It’s been one month since I graduated as a Masters in Animation, with Honors!!!! 😀
Yes, I forgot to blow my own trumpet and fell asleep almost immediately after graduating! I then got sick, recovered and then proceeded to go on holiday for a week. But I’m back and here is the proof, I did it, I really did get my Masters and below is the diploma with ‘Passed with honors’ written on it. BiG cheeseee grin. I’m a nerd!

I have also decided to show of my graduation film to you all. I put 6 months worth of time and effort in to it, and don’t want to hide it from the world any longer 😉 So here it is ‘The Boogie Man’ made by yours truly. Enjoy! https://vimeo.com/104932911

So what now? Well i have been very fortunate to have rolled straight passed the black hole that is usually awaiting most graduates. (Although I never really stopped working as a freelancer in the passed year). In the week after the big day I had a nice illustration project to make a cartoon for a chiropractor magazine, which was a great way to kick start my new career.
The text says: Just to be certain I will make an x-ray, but I believe it’s a dislocated shoulder.

Not only that though I have already had animation projects coming in, on which I have all ready started working. Yey!
I have been asked to animate for Sesam Street NL again, Yippeee! I love these projects because of the creative freedom and the fun of working with Big Bird. The poem I will be animating is about a slug who needs a new coat. I shall take you through the whole process. But before I get in to animating slugs, I have to finish another animation I am currently making for Wienerberger, building solutions.
Yes, I am making an animation for a brick company! But why I hear you say. Well all kinds of companies have something to sell or explain, and Wienerberger just so happens to want to tell the world about how sustainable their company is.
And untill now it has been the most brilliant collaboration. Their story is very interesting (I now have huge respect for bricks) and my clients are all lovely to work with.
My first meeting with them started with a guided tour through their ‘Brick Museum’! Yes they have a museum. I then found out about what they were hoping for me to do for them. Create an animated short about their companies process and it’s sustainability throughout. An ‘Explanimation’ of no more than 2 minutes for use on the internet.
This lead to a second meeting with an agreement on my quotation and then the fun started. I was given pages and pages of information and links to videos and a DVD about Wienerberger, which all had to be broken down into a compacted script… All in Dutch! My Dutch is pretty good, but to avoid messing up I hired in the brilliant and talented Isabelle Kniestedt who spent a couple of hours with me on a terras in the sun writing the perfect script. We were both amazed at how quickly it went. And with the second read through I managed to get all the information down from a 4 minute read to 2!
This I then translated to a storyboard which will eventually become the animation. This has all gone amazingly smoothly and I am now finishing up with the style sheets and character design:

I shall be working In after effects and the elements and puppets to be animated are a mixture of bitmap and vector images made in photoshop.
And in the mean time a voice actor is being arranged… So watch this space.
For the first month after graduation it’s been a brilliant start 😀