The Good ol' school days

We all went through the embarrassing era of those college days where we thought we were top dogs in the art world. I now realise how much I still had to go in the big world... But thought I'd take a look back and post some of the things that weren't so bad :)

I studied a more traditional animation form back at AFDA (The South African Film, Drama, and Arts School). Although we probably finished around 12 short films throughout the 3 years of our school career, it all came down to 2 main projects that we did in our third year. One was an experimental film I animated called "Black Heart Button", where were were allowed to experiment with the strange and wonderful aspects of animation (and in my case I chose to go dark), and the last was another project we did called "The Gravekeeper", which had an awesome set that I'd like to show off, thanks to the awesome crew that worked with me on the project!

Here are some visuals of the projects we took on.
This is a timelapse video we did animating a shot from the Gravekeeper.

It was a story about a lonely Gravekeeper, who lived in a world where little creatures were guardians to the people. Only problem is, the Gravekeeper's guardian, Ori, was afraid of almost everything, and has to learn the courage to protect the Gravekeeper from the danger that awaits him.

We had tons of fun building our sets: A fun and distorted grave yard, and the Gravekeeper's room:

Behind the scenes: Graveyard

Stopmotion animation done on green screen.

Top: The Gravekeeper's room, Bottom: Abstract Nightmare world

Black Heart Button: Experimental Film

And here I post the video of the Experimental film we did. It was really weird, and inspired by the animations done by Brothers Quay, but it was great breaking out of the formula of conventional film making.



And that's my past revealed... hope you didn't laugh too hard ;)