Long Time No Blog!

No blog in nearly 2 months? I've been busy y'see....

I packed up my bags at 10 Foxcombe Road and moved about 5 minutes over the other side of the river in Bath. It was a pain in the arse to unpack...

...but I met some lovely new housemates on the way.....

I said bon voyage to some good friends - Alison (centre) went off to work in New Zealand

and Suhanya went off to travel the world:

I bought a bike and went on a random trip to Bristol with my housemate Suz. I haven't used it since.

I saw the launch of 2 new exciting sites at work. 4mations.tv had been on the cards since I first joined so it was great to see it finally go live:

...plus the Aardman YouTube channel! Slightly less work but very exciting as I have been able to get stuck in with the production work:

I ran the 10k race at Ashton Court! It was hilly, it was hot, but it was a lot of fun. Lots of lovely friends and family helped me raise £150 for Cancer Research, which was then kindly matched by the good people at Aardman.

I went to London and did lots of touristy things with my good friend Lucy. I met a rather lovely guard standing near the houses of parliament......

And last but certainly not least, on Sunday I bought myself a Glastonbury ticket. Woop! Now I have to work on containing my excitement until next June. Sigh.

Think that's it for now! Next on the agenda is a trip to Glasgow, then Ipswich, Cardiff and then possibly a Christmas adventure to Arizona. Life is good!

I Haz Started Luvin Lolcats

When I first looked at ICanHazCheezburger.com I thought it was completely ridiculous and couldn't understand why people found it funny, but after returning there today I can't stop chuckling!



Who can't help but laugh at this, eh? Design and build wise the site is crap - but it goes to show that having an unusual and unique idea that captures people's imaginations is the foundation for a successful site and millions of hits.

Right, off to fish out some pictures of my old cats and lolify them!

My Droplet!

Got my hands on one of these little fellas the other week!


These little vinyl toys were designed by Gavin Strange, our Senior Designer at work. He came into the office and dished them out to us all in a Santa-like fashion, minus the beard and red clothing.

Droplets come in 6 different sweetie colours/flavours, but they are blind-boxed so you never know which one you are going to get. There's even a 'special edition' black and gold one which is made in a smaller ratio to the rest. Mine is named Refresher :-)

They make great pressies and are very collectable - I'm already contemplating buying another to see if I can get the pink and yellow 'rhubarb and custard' version. You can buy them worldwide from Crazy Label's store

What makes them even more popular for me - Droplet has its own Facebook page. I'm sold! :-D

I want to run...have I gone mad?

Between being ill, going to Glastonbury and moving up the ladder in my job I have somehow manged to become a couch potato.

I went to play badminton the other day and was knackered afterwards. Granted, I still won my games but I didn't do it in style :-) To make me get off my fat ass I've decided to set my sites on the Ashton Court 10k run at the end of September. It only leaves me with a month and a half to train but if I put my mind to it I think it's doable.

So, first session today: 10 minute run (I'm easing myself in gently) followed by 35 minutes on the cross trainer. My legs feel ok although I'm sure I'll feel a bit achy tomorrow.

Back to the gym tomorrow, I need to get back into an early morning routine and there's only one way to do it....

I've decided to log my training sessions here. Not exciting to read, but a good strategy to help me keep to my training schedule (small bit of sports science knowledge in there somewhere.....possibly!)

Brilliant Channel 4 Ad

More 4 recently ran a Stanley Kubrick season which was promoted by this stunning advert.



Being a fan of Stephen King, I of course love The Shining and have seen both the famous Kubrick film and lesser-known TV adaptation. Kubrick's film is far superior when it comes to style and so many iconic moments from the film have been captured in the new ad, from the snowy maze to the psychedelic carpeted corridor where Danny rides his trike. Throw in some of the original spooky music and some uncanny lookalikes for cast and crew and you've got a highly accurate re-creation.

A great ad. A great film. A great novel. If you haven't already, I would recommend checking out all 3.

Ray of Sunshine on a Monday Morning....

It's Monday morning. I've been out all weekend and despite a fairly decent night's sleep I feel as rough as ever. I get to work and I have 30 new emails, most of them needing a response in the next hour. I also have briefs to write and forums to moderate. It's typical, but without having at least 4 cups of tea first, it's a bloody nightmare.

Just as I'm getting in a tizz about what to do first I see a Google alert in my inbox picking up this boy's blog:
http://calvinsmodels.blogspot.com/2008/07/calvin-wins-shaun-sheep-prize.html and I realise what I great job I have.

W&G and Shaun are some of the few sites that have a fully-automated art gallery to encourage kids to be creative and get their work on the web. We're also their first point of contact with [enter popular animation company name here] and receiving a certificate, prize, or even just a message on the forums can be a huge confidence-booster. It also inadvertently helps them become more computer-savvy - it's funny to watch some of the kids in the forums learning basic html to make their posts bold, italic and underlined using tags, completely unaware that they're learning as they go along. lol.


It's been great to see the same members come back to our sites over and over, often on a daily basis to chat to their friends, post their art and get constructive and encouraging feedback. At the moment community features are booming, and I hope that this trend will continue a long way into the future.

Freebie Friday!

It's days like today when I love my job even more than usual.

To start the day the whole office was showered with gifts: Angry Kid season 2 and the Shaun the Sheep box set - sweet! It never occured to me at the time to ask why we were being given free stuff (my student instincts kicking in again) but I assume that it keeps the staff happy and *just might* inadvertently increase their knowledge of the 2 shows.



Later on in the day, the whole online team took a trip up to the Aztec West Studios to meet the team working on the new Timmy series, which was mind-boggling! This spin-off from Shaun is aimed at pre-schoolers and is set in a nursery where Timmy is joined by lots of other young animals. Timmy is away from the farm, where he is used to being spoiled, and has to learn some of life's lessons on his own. Each episode he learns a different lesson - the one we watched was about saying sorry. The way the story has been scripted is very effective and I think it will be very easy for kids to relate to.

After watching the pilot episode the differences between Timmy and Shaun were quite clear - Timmy is aimed at a pre-school audience - the pace is much slower, the story less complex and the colours much brighter! Saying that, the subtle Aard humour runs throughout and the story flows beatifully, it was highly entertaining to watch.

As with Shaun, kids are going to love the fun story and cute characters, and parents are going to be happy to let them site goggle-eyed in front of the TV because of the take-home messages, in addition to the cute characters of course!

What parent could resist, eh?

The Dream Team!

I love all things sentimental - our department recently got some group shots done for a magazine (cheers to Gav Strange) - they're brill!



Still images too boring? Check out Gav's mash up of the 'Aardance' and Benje's timelapse video below of a typical day in the online department - gripping stuff!

Chop Socky Chooks - Kickin' it on the Web!

The new Chop Socky Chooks website launched this week, which is super-exciting as it's the first site to be 100% designed and built by our very own Aardman boffins!


You can take a look at www.chopsockychooks.com. There'll also be a new game introduced to the site in a few months which I think will be a stunner, I can't wait to play test it!

It's extremely humbling to work with such a talented bunch of people....

:-)

Glastonbury 2008 Review

I knew this one was going to be a special festival, but I didn't realise how special. After pitching our tent and wandering around I had already fallen in love with the place. The atmosphere was totally chilled, the views are beautiful and there's live music and entertainment everywhere you walk - it's more like a group of mini-theme parks than a festival.

Bailey's camp, our home: a fair walk from the main stages but plenty of space and quiet enough to sleep at night!


Our tent, expertly built by our very own Phil

It absolutely pissed it down on Thursday night and throughout Friday, so we got our fair share of the mud:

It was a good opportunity to show off our fetching rain gear...

But then the sun came out and Saturday and Sunday were beautiful:

We found a beautiful spot at the top of a hill that looked across the whole festival site:

The acoustic tent was another favourite....chilling out in the sun at the top of the site with a cider and guitar music was awesome:

And the bands weren't bad either! Here's my pick of the weekend (my photos were crap so I've knicked some from the BBC)

The Subways
I saw these guys at Reading a couple of years ago, liked their sound and bought the album, which has turned out to be a personal favourite. Despite having a shitty lunchtime spot on the Pyramid stage, they absolutely rocked it with some old classics and new material off their upcoming album. I hope to see these guys higher up the line-up in future.

Kings of Leon
I have to confess I didn't know a lot of their stuff before the gig, but I couldn't help being taken in by Caleb Followill's unique sound - that guy has got one hell of a voice! I think they got a bit of stick for being inexperienced in delivering to such a big crowd, but really it should come down to the music - I think they should get big respect for belting out 90 minutes of awesome tunes.

The Raconteurs
In my opinion, the best band of the weekend - they've got to get a headliner spot at next year's event. Jack White. Guitar. Nuff said.

And what about Jay-Z?!
To be honest, I loved his set. Fair play to the guy, he knew he was controversial, he knew some people wouldn't like him and he took the piss out of the whole situation by coming on stage to Wonderwall and replying Noel Gallagher's comments by singing '99 problems but a bitch ain't one' - in your face Mr Gallagher!

In total we went to see 25 bands (* = my highlights):
Kate Nash
The Subways*
KT Tunstall
Young Knives
The Gossip
Foals
Editors*
We Are Scientists*
The Fratellis
Kings of Leon*
Thea Gilmore
The Wombats
The Raconteurs*
Elbow*
Amy Winehouse
Jay-Z*
Athena
Newton Faulkner*
Jack Penate
Scouting for Girls
Mark Ronson*
The Pigeon Detectives
The Zutons
The Verve*

Bloody hell, what a long essay! If you've followed me to the end, give yourself a pat on the back and go get a beer!

Glastonbury: 12 hours to go

12 hours until I set off for my first adventure at Glastonbury. I am fantastically excited right now...

Been shopping with Phil to stock up with essentials for the weekend. To me this means cider and pot noodles, but Phil is much more sensible and has bought fruit, veg and other 'proper' foodstuffs for us to eat. He also owns a tent, stove and other essentials...it's a good job he's coming otherwise I would be huddling in my sleeping bag under the stars gnawing on an 'unspecified meat' burger purchased from a suspect fast food van.

Have checked the route for tomorrow (yes, I have been trusted with getting us there in one piece) and now given up packing - I'll finish up tomorrow in a mad rush and probably forget to pack something as essential as pants....oh well!

Must get a decent night's sleep as this may be the last for a while....

23 years old - eek!

Just a quick post to say how much I enjoyed my birthday this year - mixing 3 groups of friends could have been disastrous, but it all went swimmingly!

The day started off by meeting up with my bezzie-mates from back home, Gem and Nikki, and going for a dip at the Bath Spa - it was absolute heaven.

People came round for drinks at my house and Phil bought the most AMAZING cake I've ever tasted in my life...double chocolate with chocolate goo in the middle!


Met up with everyone else in the evening for drinks in Spoons:

Emma and SP...
James, Lucy and Phil...
Me and my wee friend Emma..
Then it was on to O'Neils for some boogying:


It was very hot and sweaty in there!
Next day, I took my Mansfield friends to see the delights of Bath, which included riding some pigs....
Visiting the Royal Crescent:
And,of course, eating a 99 by the kid's playground:
What a FANTASTIC weekend, the best Birthday I have had in a good few years!

Why I love living in Bath

Bath has been my hometown for about 5 years now, but I'm still amazed at how beautiful it is.

Here's a few shots taken when my folks came to visit, we were so lucky with the weather.

Royal Crescent: Where all the posh people live.














Holborn Museum...sometimes I think I love my job too much!



















Great Pultney Street (Where they shoot street scenes for period dramas)














A random street which I thought looked really pretty!

YouTubing Award-Winning Animation to the Masses

Had a very interesting and exciting meeting with the guys from Google/You Tube today.

Our company will shortly be launching a YouTube channel which is very exciting. Being a uber-geek fan anyway, it's brilliant to think that you will soon be able to see most of Aard's vids in one area. It's even more exciting that I will be helping to run the site and build up a community.

There's around 100 clips in total to be launched, so one of the next jobs is to decide what we launch with and how frequently and how many vids we should release in future weeks/months. There's also a really fancy tool which creates a 'fingerprint' of any copyrighted material you upload and then trawls through the rest of the site flagging up any other videos which may be infringing your copyright. You can then choose whether they should be taken off.....or even better.....you can tell Google to whack an ad on the page and earn money from the advertising! Genius.

The guys also brought up an interesting point about adding all of Aard's commercials to the list as well, which I think would be a very smart move. Not only would it bulk-up the content, it would keep people interacting with the brand longer, and may also bring in new customers in future. The final idea is to generate some new, fly-on-the-wall style stuff, which I think would be the most popular content of the lot. From my experience people LOVE to see anything behind the scenes, anything they wouldn't get by watching the TV or reading a book, something that is more personal. Filming it in a fairly amateur way would give it a much more personal feel, plus we could do it on a shoe-strong budget and whack-up new videos every few weeks, which is the most important drive behind the site: new, regular content.

I'm still skeptical about the commercials and behind the scenes vids as there's a lot of red tape to get through first, but hopefully we can open people's eyes so they see how effective this strategy could be. Watch this space.

I am English, therefore I LOVE tea

I luuurve the tea.....

Since I've started working properly (ie I'm not a lazy student anymore) I've started drinking more tea. I thought it was just a boredom thing, ie. I'd go and make a cuppa instead of sitting at my desk, but now I actually think I'm addicted.

I couldn't function today without having a cup and I think by the end of the day I had had 5 or 6 - not good. Think I'll have to check on the ol' blood pressure and go to the gym a bit more to avoid developing the body of a typical coffee drinker.....

Found this picture on someone's blog and thought it was quite cool :-) The ironic thing? The graffiti is on a wall in Berlin. Pah.

Twitter - A Cynic's Perspective

My ramblings for today...

I've recently been introduced to the world of Twitter (yes, I know I'm 2 years late compared to the rest of the population) but I'm still confused as to whether I like it or not.

I love Facebook. And I love to update my status on a fairly regular basis to let people know what I'm up to and to see whether I can write something that makes people laugh. For this reason I can see why Twitter is popular - people like to know what their friends and family are doing and how they are feeling. I find that reading someone's status on Facebook is a useful way of seeing how often they are online, what they consider to be most important piece of news in their life at the moment, and often how funny they are :-D

At the same time I take a step back and think 'isn't this all getting a little self-indulgent?'. At least on Facebook updating your status is only a small part of the reason you are on the site. It remains on your profile for people to see if they actively choose to seek out your page and find out what you're up to. On the other hand, Tweets are written to be broadcast - the entire purpose of the site is to tell the online world what you are doing.

I'm all for shouting about yourself if you've got something interesting or humorous to say, but tweets like 'good morning twitterers' or 'eating soup' just seem pointless to me. What makes it worse is when people post personal comments in the search for acceptance or reassurance - often from complete strangers who are following their Tweets. I have kids on our forums at work who do a better job of getting straight to the point - 'post things you like about me on this thread otherwise I am leaving this forum forever'. lol.

I have a work colleague who updates her Twitter at least 3-4 times a day, every day without fail. Fair enough, it's primarily for work purposes and I have to admit that having regular updates visible makes a website look good - but isn't it a little sad that you become tied to your laptop and conditioned into making quirky little comments about your life on the hour, every hour? And if Twitter wasn't controlling your life enough while you are at your desk, they even let you Tweet from your mobile. There's no escape from telling the world about yourself. Me, me, me....

The argument against this, of course, is that this is what blogging is all about - posting thoughts and ideas to the web and 'getting yourself heard'. I would respond by saying there is a fine line between wanting to share intersting information with peers and seeking acceptance through self-indulgent blogging.

I'll give Twitter a trial-run, but I'm not convinced just yet.

Foo Fighters at Wembley - FOOking Awesome!

Foo Fighters, Wembley Stadium, 6th June 2008

After forking out a stupid amount of money back in November for tickets to potentially one of the greatest gigs of our lives, the wait was finally over for me and my gig-buddy Phil.

Seetickets really made us sweat by not delivering the tickets until the very last minute - I had to pick them up on the morning of the gig. However, once that was sorted we fuelled up with a Wetherspoons breakfast and made our way to the coach station. After a bit of a cock-up with bus tickets (mainly involving us sprinting in between coach stations looking for the right bus) we were on our way to London.

Even though we've been there before, I couldn't help but stand and stare open-mouthed at the size of the new Wembley Stadium - it's bloody huge!

After finding and using the most important facilities - toilets, tshirt stand and beer - we were ready to see some music:

Warm Ups
The sound quality was pretty poor for these guys - probably because of the stadium set up. The stage was situated in the middle of the arena so that the crowd could view from all angles.

Lots of speakers at different angles + not enough people in the stadium for the supporting acts = way too many echoes.





Didn't even catch the name of the first group, although from doing some net-based research I've found out they were called Against Me. Why they don't put the band name on the drum set and shout out their name as much as possible is beyond me, after all, isn't the aim of being a support act to get your name out there and seel some cds?

Second act was Supergrass - love these guys. Have seem them at numerous gigs and festivals and they always put on a great show. Played loads of new material I hadn't heard before, as well as classice like Caught by the Fuzz - and very surprisingly, Alright!

The Main Attraction
A mind-blowing 21-song set, with Dave Grohl on top form. Being in the crowd was mental - 2.5 hours of beer-throwing, moshing and screaming at the tops of our voices.



Check out the set list:

Pretender
Times Like These
No Way Back
Cheer Up Boys
Learn To Fly
This Is A Call
Long Road To Ruin
Breakout
Stacked Actors
Skin + Bones
Marigold
My Hero
Cold Day
But Honestly
Everlong
Monkey Wrench
All My Life

Big Me
DOA
Generator
Best Of You

Best.night.ever. Nuff said.

Cat-sitting

Cats. I bloody love them, always have, but I have to agree they are completely manipulative.


Take the one in this post for example - Tillie, I am looking after for a friend at the moment. She looks cute, yeah? Not at 2 in the morning when she's scratching on the door to get into your bedroom. Then at 4am. Then at 6am. I could go on...

I've given in and decided to let her in my room at night. Bizarrely, having a cat walking all over me in the middle of the night doesn't wake me up half as often as hearing her scratching at the door!

Don't get me wrong though, it's fantastic stress-relief after a hard day's work to have her sit on my lap and purr, plus she goes mental over cable ties, so scattering them across the floor provides her (and me!) with hours of entertainment!

Sleeping, eating, and playing - I think I could handle being a cat.

My Favourite Song in the World...Ever!

I first heard Coldplay's "Yellow" in a pool hall back in Mansfield when I was about 15 years old - 8 years ago now!

To start with, it reminds me of being young and having fun with my friends in the summer of 2000, but since then I have been to see Coldplay in numerous different cities with some of the most special people in my life. It's a song that will always hold so many happy memories for me.

If you've lived on another planet for the past decade here's what you've been missing out on:



The only thing that bugs me now is that my ex-boyfriend used to sing "and it was all yellow....blue!" - I'll never hear the words in the same way again !

Life Drawing

Aardman have very kindly organised a 7-week long life drawing class for any staff that fancied having a go. I haven't done any 'proper' drawing since GCSE (A good 6 years ago now!) but thought I'd give it a go.

So far we've learned the art of drawing stick men (believe me, it's harder than you think!) and now we're moving onto filling out the shape a bit more.

The most difficult part is that we only have 30secs - 1 minute on each pose so the aim is not to get bogged down in the detail and instead, focus on the shapes and weight of the structure.

So, I have attached a few of the charcoal sketches I have been working on - very quick and rough but I think I have improved slightly since week 1. We've still got 4 weeks left and so I'm hoping to post some more exciting drawings soon - watch this space!