It's been a long time coming...

Wow, please don't look at when my last post was, it's just embarrassing.

A whole lot has happened since my last post, or my last update! I've been on a 5-month long adventure traveling part of the world, moved house twice and spent more time in London than any self-respecting human being should ever be made to spend there.

You can see an animation I did about one part of our travels here:

I've made the tricky decision to cut back on some of my workload, in order to improve my skills and get more involved in the online community. I have been slowly improving my C4D skills, but there is so much I still need to learn. So to do this I have had to turn down some work, I'm not sure if it was the right decision yet and I don't want to burn any bridges, but I would love to become the kind of designer that gets brought in on high-profile projects, so that will be my focus for the next year or so. Let's see how it goes...

Updates!

Well, it has been a while since my last post, but today is a designated "do stuff on the website" day. There are some cool projects I've been working on recently, a couple of which are online, a couple are still pending release.

I've been trying to get a bit of variety in my work - a lot has been influenced by my self promo animation, which has had a great reception and has found me a bit of work, which is good. I'm quite aware that it is playing on the current shape layer/ vector style that is getting a lot of love in the motion graphics community, and while this isn't a bad thing at all and it still looks fresh to me, I've been trying at every opportunity to diverge from this and get out of my comfort zone a bit more. 

The way that I'm going about this is to approach projects from a different viewpoint (whether it is 3D, film, stop motion) and to get more into illustration. This has always been a weak point for me - and by that I mean the act of actually sitting down with a pen/pencil/paintbrush and drawing something that looks good before I touch it up in the computer.

I think that doing personal projects that involve this will help significantly. This is mainly because when faced with a commercial animation project, I think "how can I make something that looks good, but can be easily animated and turned around on time and to budget by one person?" When illustrating a single frame, these restrictions disappear and I can play around with styles without worrying about how layers and textures will animate. This in turn will hopefully spawn some techniques that can carry through into my animation.

Anyway, more on that in a different post. And more on what I've been up to in a professional capacity in a third post. Today might be a bumper-triple-post kind of day, which I'm not sure is the right way to do things when maintaining a blog (in fact, I'm positive it's not what you're meant to do) but what if It's another 2 months before I find the time to post something? Just pretend that they are all spaced out at regular intervals and we'll be fine...