Saturday 21 November 2009

Star Wars: Uncut

Star Wars: Uncut is the brainchild of Vimeo and Boxee creator Casey Pugh. The idea is to re-create the film, fifteen seconds at a time. How does it work? First, you claim your scene, there are 473 to choose from, you then have thirty days to make it in whatever fashion you want. Viewer's can then rate the videos with the Vimeo's 'Like' system and the most popular will be edited together to form an entirely fan-made version of the film. Here's my submission.



I chose to base my animation on the manga comic adaption by Hisao Tamaki to reflect the close relationship Star Wars has always had with the comic medium. From the original Marvel adaption by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin, to the current selection of titles published by Dark Horse, Star Wars comics are often as cherished as the films themselves. I selected and loosely re-drew various figures from Tamaki's books and then created individual background's in Photoshop. For the TIE fighter, I sourced a 3D model on the excellent Google SketchUp and re-drew the desired angle. The animation was then put together in Adobe Flash. To abide with the submission rules I recorded all the sound effects and speaking parts myself (please forgive my Alec Guinness impersonation). It's been a really rewarding project to create and I've already bagged my next scene, which I promise will be something completely different.

Thursday 5 November 2009

New Portfolio Website

My new portfolio website is now on-line. This is the first website I've designed and built and I'm not shy to admit that it's been an intense learning curve. The site concentrates on my commercial work as a creative artworker with a smidgen of personal stuff. It's not all there yet but now that I'm free to concentrate on other work, I'm intending to update it with new projects regularly.