Damien Gascoigne is a director that works at PicassoPictures his style is very illustrative and he came to Stockport College in 2009 to give a special guest lecture.
He started by saying that this a great time to be an animator, I am assuming he is referring to the development in technology and as a result of the developments in technology there is vast opportunities for moving image designers out there. Gascoigne gave the advice to the students watching the lecture that we should always be snooping around and looking for opportunities and exploring our curiosities. Gascoigne started to talk about what he does in his spare time and mentioned that he likes to draw and constantly thinks about hair, as he doesn’t have much – he joked. Gascoigne connected with the audience and made the lecture very personal to him by talking about his personal life and his family – particularly his granny.
Gascoigne then starts to explain his practices. When he is animating characters he firstly obtains his characters from people around him and colleagues one example was the receptionist from PicassoPictures called Sash. Then Gascoigne doodles them and takes pictures of them and then tries to find the story behind the photos he has taken. Gascoigne also observes shapes and objects from his surrounding environments and as a result he explains that he has a lot of happy accidents from this. He continues by saying that he notices the smallest and the strangest of things.
Gascoigne told his audience that he has recently started to learn 3D animation and worked on it with student Jonathan Harris. Harris helped Gascoigne to build two characters. One of the characters was Sash the receptionist that I mentioned earlier. I quote Gascoigne “Animating in 3D is like driving a Porsche in a chip shop.” I guess from this he means 3D animation is disastrous and very difficult and perhaps dangerous! Gascoigne went on to talk about the process in creating this animation that is incomplete but still managed to show the audience a test! It was great to see some work in the middle of production by a professional practitioner. The process began with storyboards and I quote Gascoigne saying, “ The storyboard, the greatest struggle in moving image.” I can sympathise with him on this. Then models of the characters are made out of clay to get an idea how to model the characters in a 3D environment. During the process Gascoigne uses both 2D and 3D elements and combines them together and Gascoigne is enjoying the battle. The 2D elements mainly consist of hand drawn elements.
This video below is a clip of a piece Gascoigne made in 2005 its called 'Careful', the credits and synopsis follow.
Credits and synopsis are from: http://www.britfilms.com/britishfilms/catalogue/browse/?id=C1CB553218e761E04DsKy41D34EB
Brief synopsis:
A 7 year old girl is sent on a mission to post a letter by her controlling mother. Her actions lead the girl to be blown into a surreal landscape, full of foreboding suspended objects. We follow the girl's accidental adventures as she is caught in a dangerous storm.
Format: DigiBeta
Year of Production: 2005
Running Time: 6 mins 7 secs
Director: Damian Gascoigne
Producer: Jo Gallagher
Editing: Rod Main
Off Line Editing: Max Brill
Script Writer: Liana Dognini & Damian Gascoigne
Sound Design: Tom Russell
Music: Ben Park
Compositing: Sam Atkin, Ian Sargent
Animation: Kristian Andrews, Philippa Leathers, Alex Smith
After Effects Design: Paul Duffield & Cristina Seresini
CG Animation: James Kirkham
Art Department: James Innes
Camera Assistants: Chris Strong & Hannah Truran
Boy on Screen: Munro Gascoigne
Girl on Screen: Natasha Gascoigne
Production Company:
Picasso Pictures
9-11 Broadwick Street
London W1F 0DB, England
Telephone +44 (0)20 7437 9888
Fax +44 (0)20 7287 8786
claire@picassopictures.com
Sales Agent: c/o Picasso Pictures
This lecture proved to be a very entertaining yet different lecture from any over the others I have seen so far, perhaps because it was entertaining and that we all got to see work that was in production. Also we learnt about the design process that Gascoigne went through to create his work in some detail.
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