Archive for the ‘James Calvert’ Category

Itty Bitty Ditties – latest PRA animation airs tomorrow

January 20, 2010

The first episodes of our 1-minute interstitial series, “Itty Bitty Ditties” will be airing tomorrow on children’s channel ABC3 during “Studio 3″ around 7:00am. The series features Brian the Budgie as he travels the world on his Hog, Ernst in search of singing partners for nonsensical duets.

James created and directed the series, which features character design work from illustrator Chris Edser, who we’re huge fans of. The music was composed by longtime PRA collaborator Benjamin Speed with lyrics written by The Beards songwriter Tom Bettany. Tom’s bandmate Joel McMillan provides Brian the Budgie’s vocals.

You can catch the first of the episodes on ABC on the following dates:

  • Thursday 21st January – 7:00am, as part of “Studio 3″
  • Friday 19 Februabry – 6:53am
  • Monday 22 Fenruary – 6:53am
  • Tuesday 23 February – 6:53am

Posted in James Calvert, TV Series | 1 Comment »

Annecy – Part 3: Promotional Materials

June 16, 2009

Some of the things we’ll be taking with us to Annecy…

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Posted in Annecy, Eddie White, film, Film Festivals, James Calvert, Short Films, The Cat Piano, The Ghastly Gourmet Cooking Show, Video Posts | Leave a Comment »

Annecy – Part 1

June 12, 2009

James and I are currently in France for the Annual Annecy International Animation Film Festival, representing The Cat Piano and The Ghastly Gourmet Cooking Show.

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Posted in Annecy, Eddie White, Film Festivals, James Calvert, Short Films, The Cat Piano, Video Posts | Leave a Comment »

Bridging the experience gap

April 8, 2009

A media graduate recently asked me an interesting question. He wanted to know how to break into the industry when everybody is asking for a minimum of 2 years experience. He also asked if his time studying counted towards these two years.

My response…

There’s an experience gap between finishing studies and finding an entry level job at a studio. After that, there’s a big gap between being at an entry level standard and a professional standard.

We recently surveyed people who work for us and people we know about what it takes to be a professional in the animation industry. We calculated that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of hands-on work to be able to consider yourself a working animation professional. 10,000 hours roughly equates to 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 5 years.

A university degree will typically get you to about 4,000 hours. But to have enough experience to get an entry level job, you will need about 6,000 under your belt. After that, 2 years of solid work should get you to the 10,000 hour mark.

0 – 4,000 hrs

This can include your study as well as personal projects you do in your own time. These days, submitting images to forums like CGtalk are a very valuable way of building up your experience. If your animation course doesn’t get you to 4,000 hands-on hours you may have to do a postgraduate course to get there.

4,000 – 6,000 hrs

Animation is all about creative problem solving. The more problems you know the answers to, the better you are as an asset to a studio. It’s also about knowing how to work in a team with expectations imposed on you. Some of this experience can only be found outside the classroom. The way I see it, is you have a couple of options:

1. You build up your two years experience working with other recent graduates, or small startup companies. People who are in the same boat as you. It’s all about learning as much as you can and getting practical experience.

2. Do as much work experience and placements as possible. This usually requires you work another job at the same time to survive. Try to get as many hours under you belt working in a professional studio environment. This is all about persistence. If you plug away at it for a year or so, you’ll soon end up with the experience you need to land a good job.

6,000 – 10,000 hrs

If you were to come and work here or any other studio, even as a junior, 95% of what you will be asked to do you would have never done before. This is why it’s a big undertaking for a studio to agree to train someone up. Smaller studios may simply not have the resources to do it. After a couple of solid years of working, you should have enough experience to consider yourself a professional.

Here’s a case study of one of our lead artists:

This lead artist spent most of his high school drawing. After school he did a 3 year degree in visual arts. During this time and aside from his study he also worked on amateur short films doing anything from VFX, storyboarding to design work. After study, he spent another 2 years working on whatever jobs he could, illustration or whatever. Then he came to the PRA with a reasonably well developed portfolio and experience of working in team. He worked for us part time for a year or so and now works full time.

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Posted in careers, James Calvert | Leave a Comment »

Termites Redux: Top End Pest Control, “The Bugfather” TVC

August 11, 2008

Ever since the Fleischers made “Hoppity goes to Town”, Insects have been ubiquitous with animation. They have become some of animation’s most enduring icons: Jiminy Cricket, the characters from Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” and Louis the Fly from the Mortein commercials come to mind. The very first fully 3D piece of animation we made years ago was for a termite barrier product. We recently got the chance to revisit the genre…

more about “Top End Pest Control, “The Bugfather”…“, posted with vodpod

We were approached earlier this year by advertising agency, Image & Substance to create a TVC for one of their clients, Top End Pest Control. Although this was a local campaign for the Northern Territory with a smaller budget than a national campaign, it was important for us to deliver something we were proud of. Being new to animation, the agency and client were open to a lot of ideas and we were able to contribute a lot of creative ideas on how we could make something look excellent on a budget.

We decided to limit the number of characters and settings and put the main focus on memorable characters and a good story. Thematically, the TVC takes many cues from film noir and gangster films such as The Godfather, Scarface and Sin City.

Although it didn’t have the big budget or wide exposure of some of our other TVCs, its straightforward execution of an elegantly simple idea makes it one of our favourite projects to date.




[Character design concepts]

[Storyboard Frames]

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Posted in Bugfather, James Calvert, TVC, Video Posts | 1 Comment »

Completed Work: Rundle Mall TVC

June 19, 2008

This is our latest TV Commercial, which we made for Rundle Mall, Adelaide’s (Australia) premier fresco-styled shopping district in the heart of the city. The TV Commercial was produced with advertising agency, Clemenger BBDO Adelaide.

more about “Completed Work: Rundle Mall TVC“, posted with vodpod

According to James Calvert, who directed the TVC:

Recreating the Adelaide institution that is Rundle Mall turned out to be one of the most challenging yet rewarding jobs I have had to do as an animation director. Our main character “Ginger” had to walk down the Mall in one continuous shot, while around her the seasons changed. Ginger had to change costumes and so did each of our 100 background characters.

The trees drop their leaves in Autumn, the flowers bloom in Spring. Normally something of this magnitude would be reserved for a feature film! I guess thats the point of difference with this commercial, is that we’ve packed all these elements and a bit of magic into a 30 second spot.

The biggest artistic inspiration for us was the Japanese artist Tadahiro Uesugi [Below]. Tadahiro’s work captures the colours and light quality of each season and this was something we wanted to replicate in the commercial. We made the ad in a way that if you were to pause on any frame it would look like a piece of artwork in it’s own right.

Posted in 4 Seasons, Clemenger BBDO, James Calvert, Rundle Mall, TVC, Video Posts | 15 Comments »

Confirmation

March 20, 2008

You can watch our shorts on Nick at:

  • The Ghastly Gourmet Cooking Show – Wednesday 2 April, 6:30pm
  • I Was a Teenage Butterfly – Friday 11 April, 6:30pm

The shorts can also be seen on Nickelodeon’s online site Nick TURBO in the TURBO XTRA section.

————————————

[original date: Wed 20 June 2007]

Today is my 25th Birthday, and I am spending it in Shanghai with Eddie and Sam discussing the upcoming feature project with the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. James has been in Annecy, France for the last week promoting the Dust Echoes shorts, and has just arrived here to join us for the creative discussions with SAFS.

We got an email today that two of our pitches for the Nickelodeon Australia Nick Shorts initiative have been successful and will go into production. They’ve sent over a contract for us to look at and we’re keen to get started on them when we get back. The initiative was put together by Nickelodeon Australia, the Screen Producers Association (SPAA) of Australia and the NSW Film and Television Office (FTO).

The 2 ideas we got through were I Was a Teenage Butterfly and The Ghastly Gourmet Cooking Show. In total, we pitched 4 ideas, but these two were the most developed. We had pitched them both previously and unsuccessfully for other initiatives.

I Was a Teenage Butterfly

iwatb_concept_nick_pitch.jpg

IWATB is about an Emo butterfly named Floyd, who tries to be rebellious in an environment that has nothing antagonistic or unjust about it. His parents are frustratingly kind and supportive. He’s the lead singer and guitarist in a high school punk/rock band called “The Whatevers”, with his best friend Greta, a pessimistic black widow spider; Sting, a bee on bass guitar; and Slater, a slater bug on drums who never speaks. Our tagline for it is “Rebel without a Cocoon”

This seems to be the year for these initiatives from localised animation channels. At the beginning of the year, Cartoon Network Asia launched a very similar initiative, followed by Disney Channel Australia in March. We pitched IWATB for both initiatives and were unsuccessful both times. We did get close with Disney Channel making it to the interview stage. I think their main concern was that Floyd was too Emo. It also had similar themes to another Disney Channel show called The Buzz on Maggie, which featured a teenage fly in an insect band. It’s odd how many ideas you develop have the same themes as other projects in production or development. You have to be a bit lucky to get it right first!

The Ghastly Gourmet Cooking Show

gg_nick_concept.jpg

GGCS is based on our Tropfest short, Carnivore Reflux, and is essentially a gross animated cooking show. We originally developed it as an adult themed short format series for an ABC/SA Film Corporation initiative to create a 13 x 5 minute series. We were shortlisted for the initiative and given money to develop it further, even taking it to MipCom in 2006, but eventually we lost the initiative earlier this year. While we were waiting on the assessment from ABC, we were not allowed to pitch the idea to anyone else, and so we were not able to pitch it for the Cartoon Network or Disney Channel competitions.

Originally we took the chefs from Carnivore Reflux and developed the idea for the series around them by embellishing their characters. The characters were Cog, a gruesome gadget aficionado; Grog, a drunk; Voila, a chef with a mad eye for aesthetics; Shirley, the brute mother figure of the team; and Pith, the apprentice. For the Nick pitch, we replaced Pith with two children, Basil and Pepper, who are brother and sister forced to spend the holidays with their uncles and aunt who are the GGCS chefs. We changed the colour palette to appeal more to this audience.

[original chefs from "Carnivore Reflux, 2006"]

[Chefs from the adult themed Ghastly Gourmet Cooking Show. L-to-R: Cog, Grog, Pith, Voila & Shirley]

[Chefs for Nick pitch. L-to-R: Glug, Cog, Basil, Pepper, Voila and Shirley]

Initiatives

We’re now getting to the stage where we’re outgrowing initiatives. When we were starting out, they were really good for us. Initiatives would marry together the involvement of a funding body and a broadcaster, making it easier for emerging talent like us to get around putting a deal together. You get a bit of money to make something that gets you a lot of exposure. The only problem is there isn’t usually a lot of money involved or room to move in negotiating the contracts. At some stage, you have to outgrow the initiatives and start creating your own opportunities. The next crop of talent will then go through the same way. We’re quite lucky in South Australia that there have been a lot of these initiatives run over the years that helped us grow very quickly.

We’re getting to the stage where the money offered in these initiatives are no longer viable, and the opportunities are not helping us move forward. Nevertheless, we have yet to get a TV series off the ground and initiatives like this will help us get closer by helping us develop a relationship with broadcasters and get some of our work on the air.

Posted in Carnivore Reflux, Dust Echoes, Early Career, Eddie White, I Was a Teenage Butterfly, Inititatives, James Calvert, Sony Tropfest, The Ghastly Gourmet Cooking Show, TV Series | Leave a Comment »

Wednesday 3 October 2007

December 20, 2007

lancersss_grad.jpg

2 weeks left till final delivery (17/10). James has taken some photos of the local streets for reference. Reference photos have been handy on this project. Some of the car interiors will be painted off photo reference as well as the matte paintings of the suburban streets.

Posted in James Calvert, Mitsubishi Lancer, Sony Tropfest, Supershort, TVC, Video Posts | Leave a Comment »

Footnote: Eddie & James

December 4, 2007

lancersss_grad.jpg

Thought it might be a good idea to write a bit about the co-directors of this “Supershort” – Eddie White and James Calvert.

It was the 3 of us that started PRA – originally we were just three 14-year-old friends with a Super 8 camera and some crazy ideas. I met Eddie when i was 11 in primary school, and I met James through Eddie when they went to high school together. After high school we began hiring a space to work out of. We were pretty naive and didn’t make any money for a couple of years, until Eddie’s brother Sam joined us and got us organised.

Eddie is a writer-director. He’s written all our films to date, and directed more than a few. He’s also the Creative Director, with the job of driving our studio’s overall [ahem] creative direction. He studies acting at university and really understands performance back to front, which really helps.

James on the other hand is a director/cinematographer. He studied photography after high school and just knows how to make stuff look really good. He’s also our Production Director, which involves making sure the way we do things is efficient and gives us the best results.

Between them, not much gets in the way of telling a great story. They directed our first short film together, Fritz gets Rich, and our second film, Carnivore Reflux – which got into Sony Tropfest and led us to this Mitsubishi Lancer “supershort”. They’ve both grown as directors since Carnivore Reflux and now direct projects on their own.

To give you a better idea of what they’re like, I’ve dug up this funny video from last year, when Carnivore Reflux won the Inside Film award for best animation. They went up to accept the award in front of a national television audience, and well, just watch the video…

Posted in Carnivore Reflux, Eddie White, IF Awards, James Calvert, Mitsubishi Lancer, Sony Tropfest, Supershort, TVC, Video Posts | 1 Comment »

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