Orlando Film Commission

Ran across this on Twitter today. The Orlando Film Commission tweeted about the Dart Frog animation we helped out with awhile back. Fun to run across a familiar face!

Highway Rat at Annecy

The Highway Rat is screening at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival this year - and has been nominated in the TV Films category!  Congrats to the whole Triggerfish crew who put together some amazing animation.

Bink Storyboards

Eric Miller posted the original storyboards for Bink on his YouTube channel.  It's a fun chance to see behind the scenes and see what we start with as animators.

Highway Rat Wins At NYCIFF

The Highway Rat just won the Audience Award (age 3-6) at the New York International Children's Film Festival.   It was also it's North American premier.  Congrats to Jeroen Jaspaert and everyone at Triggerfish!

Highway Rat Shots!

Here's my shots from The Highway Rat!  Enjoy!

Highway Rat Credits

It was a nice surprise to see that I was in the credits for The Highway Rat!  All of us who came in for the last month got credit - which is very cool of Triggerfish to include us with everyone who worked so hard for the past year.

I finally got to see the final film - and it was really adorable and looked amazing.  I'm hoping to post my shots soon.

Merry Christmas & "The Highway Rat" Premier

It's Christmas time once again!  It seems that animation is a natural fit into family holiday traditions.  Most of us have fond memories as kids watching the Charlie Brown Christmas or the Rankin/Bass stop-motion specials (personally, I'll always have a spot for A Garfield Christmas and Christmas Eve on Sesame Street).  There's nothing like cuddling down on the couch after a big holiday morning and relaxing with family & friends watching the Christmas shows on TV.  Well, I'm excited to have had a small part in crafting a new holiday special.

With any luck you might be able to stream The Highway Rat on the BBC One site after it premiers. It may depend on what side of the pond you live on.  Check out the link HERE

Here's to a busy and eventful 2017.  May 2018 be as eventful, but maybe a little less busy...

First Clip from Highway Rat

Here's a first clip posted by the BBC!  Can't wait to see this (although, for those of us in the US, we might have to wait until a Netflix debut next year...)

BBC One Christmas Promo

The first few clips of The Highway Rat show up here.  I had to laugh watching the promo, because they are also airing Home which I worked on and Big Hero 6 that my wife worked on.  About a third of the BBC Christmas movies have someone from the Raymond household involved :)

First Highway Rat Review

The List has the first review for The Highway Rat, and they gave it a 4 out of 5.  They said that "if you've got kids this is the perfect cute and cosy addition to the Christmas TV schedules."  Just two weeks until it'll premier on BBC-One.  Another quote from the article:

You can tell The Highway Rat is made with love by Magic Light Pictures. The vocal talent is exceptional, with Rob Brydon narrating, David Tennent as the eponymous rat, and Nina Sosanya as the Duck, even bit parts are filled by actors of the stature of Tom Hollander and Frances de le Tour. The animation is big and chunky bringing Axel Scheffler's illustrations to vivid primary coloured life.

Bink at CTNx This Year

 

While I'm unfortunately unable to attend CTNx this year, it's fun to see that Bink and Eric Miller Animation are going to be there in booth form!  Pretty fun to see the 3 foot cutout of Bink from one of the promo poses I did :)  Hope they have a great time at the conference!

Highway Rat Press Begins

The initial press screening (along with the original book authors) took place this week.  It looks like we'll be seeing a lot of press and some new images coming out soon - like this one from RadioTimes

First Look At "The Highway Rat"

The BBC issued a press release announcing the cast of The Highway Rat and providing a first official look.  David Tennant leads the cast for the special that will air on BBC One this Christmas.  You can read the whole article HERE

As The Highway Rat himself would say:

“Give me your pastries and puddings! Give me your chocolate and cake! For I am the Rat of the Highway, and whatever I want I take.”

Highway Rat Animation Wraps

As the Triggerfish Facebook post says, we wrapped on animation on The Highway Rat this week.  There's some incredible animation on this one and it only will keep looking better in lighting!

The Highway Rat

I'm really excited to be helping out Triggerfish during their final push on The Highway Rat!

It's a holiday TV special that will air on the BBC.  It is produced by the same authors and production company that created The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom - which are staples in our house.  The production is very much like those shorts - charming and a fun almost stop-motion quality.

I can't wait for everyone to see the amazing work going into this short.

Bink at DreamWorks!

In a fun twist, Eric Miller gave a presentation at DreamWorks this week on his startup company.  I love seeing this image of Bink onscreen in the review room in my old stomping grounds.  A handful of the Bink team are still at DreamWorks and attended the talk.  Eric's been keeping his company pretty busy, which hopefully will fund the next round of Bink shorts.  I'm also scheduled to help him out on a public-service project in the next year.

Check out Eric Miller Animation Studios full post on the DW talk HERE

Bink on APSU Art Page and Blog

Our dept chair wrote up a nice blog post about my work on Bink.  Check it out at:
http://www.artapsu.com/2016/09/professor-scott-raymond-completes-work-on-the-animated-web-series-bink/

Wrote a Tutorial for 3D World!

I'm very excited to share a glimpse of the 4 page "Tips & Trick" tutorial I wrote for 3D World Magazine in their Sept issue.  It was a nice chance to show a peek behind the curtain of creating the Bink short.  The hardest thing was trying to condense my tips down to the proper length!  I remember spending about a half hour once just talking about proper blinks to the crowds team at DreamWorks - and now I had to get that down into about 75 words!  I owe much of this to all my mentors from DW that showed me many of these same tips for the first time.

You can preview and buy a copy of the issue at 3D World

Bink: New Arrival

The first short of the web series Bink I animated on was released today!  It was really fun to get to work (virtually) with some ol' DreamWorks colleagues again.  I know Eric was using this as a way to show what his new company was capable of producing, and I hope it goes over well so we all get a chance to work on the next batch of shorts.

You can check out more thinks Bink-related HERE

Bink Promotional Poses

I got word today that Bink has wrapped in lighting, and just has a few last min details in editing - which means a premiere date has been set.  One week from today it'll come out on Eric Miller Animation Studios YouTube page.

A fun aspect of working on Bink was the opportunity to also create some "promotional" poses for Eric.  I did around a dozen that he requested, such as the one you see above.  I remember all the scrutiny that went on at DreamWorks when they were creating promo poses for their films - so it was fun to indulge for a bit and really fine tune the poses to make the most appealing and interesting character possible.

Till next week...