Yesterday some of my pupils told me they’ve memorised poems to recite at the end-of-year performance tomorrow, and I asked one of them to recite it for me. Very nice too. They asked me if I know any poems, and I realised that I do. I only ever memorised one poem in my life, Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, when I was about 13 or 14, and for some reason it’s stuck with me. So I gave an impassioned and theatrical rendition in front of the frankly befuddled class. Today I thought I’d extend things a bit, and so, taking the first stanza, which goes like this:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I explained that many of the words are invented, but we can tell something about them by the context – that an article must mean it’s a noun, the ‘s’ at the end means the noun is probably plural, and so on. This is actually a rather interesting area for a linguist, as are the rules which govern fake-word validity (I made that up because it’s years and years since I read any research on this and I can’t be bothered to re-look it up) but I didn’t stray down that path with my nine year-olds. Instead I used the famous Tenniel illustration of the Jabberwock wiffling through the tuldgey wood, as an example of how we might imagine unknown words, and asked them all to draw illustrations of the first stanza – imagining when brillig might be, where is a wabe, what are raths, why are they mome and what does to gyre mean. Anyway, I thought this would be quite a fun, interesting task, but it turned out to be tortuously difficult to get them to understand that these words mean what you want them to mean; one boy asked if he could look up rath in the dictionary. The teacher I was working with said they’re not accustomed to using their imaginations – I don’t know if that’s true, perhaps – and if it is, rather sad I think. One girl told me – I don’t have an imagination, well of course you do, you’ve just got to exercise it.
Anyway, afterwards I’ll show them the Tenniel illustration of this stanza and we can see how they compare.

Incidentally, I occasionally dabble in fake-wordery myself, though I stray rather beyond the bounds of specifically anglo-saxon-isms, trying to inflect words with a variety of different languages. I’ve tried as well in Spanish, but that’s quite difficult.

And here’s yesterday‘s making-of gif – rather a long one, I’m afraid:

No extraneous photoshop today, because my print screen isn’t working – which is odd.

Mostly still animating… in the home stretch now though. Will be very glad to finish.

Making of Beach

Still coughing up my lungs

My video is on hefnet!

I’ve had an altogether fluy weekend – recovery not helped by forcing myself to work. Today I went into school because there were things that just needed to be done (this week is exam week) but I dragged myself home before lunch time.

Some colour at last.

Last night I went to another gig in very much the same vein as the last. If The Wave Pictures are the spiritual successors to Hefner then Darren Hayman and the Secondary Modern are the actual successors, Darren Hayman being the former Hefner frontman.

After playing a bunch of new songs he said, “it’s around this point in the gig that the crowd starts to get a bit nervous, wondering if we’re going to play any Hefner songs…” And they did, and they played some corkers. The music was awesome, despite a guitar retuning between every song, and really benefited from the slightly unusual four-piece arrangement of drums, guitar, bass, violin.

The new songs are as powerful as anything in the Hefner/The French canon, and I think that it’s really noteworthy that the most recent album, Pram Town, works well both (as it’s subtitle declares) as a folk opera, a concept album about new towns, and as individual songs which retain all the humour and pathos we loved so much from Hefner.
I was slightly disappointed not to hear anything off Table For One (Hayman’s first solo record) but you can’t get everything.
The finale rendition of late-Hefner classic, When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines, was astonishing. And you can watch it here (sorry about my tuneless singing :P)

It was a shame to see a somewhat less-than-packed venue, and there only seemed to be about three obsesives there, standing in a row, belting out the choruses (you can hear all three of us in the video above) and dancing about, ignoring the immobility of most everyone else there. Still, it was a good gig.

Afterwards I bought a cd and got it signed and had a wee chat with Darren, and the bassist, whose name, like a terrible fan, I don’t know and whose beer I spilled, like the Barnes I am. I said I’d tried to come the last time he’d played in Madrid but had had to work, and he told me the last time was shit, so that was probably a good thing. Anyway, I realised I was getting a bit too crazy-fannish, so I scarpered.
A good night.

Not everything is going perfectly at the moment.
Stupid problems at work,
animation progressing too slowly and difficultly,
future looks incomprehensible,
feeling quite cut off from the world.

Time for a little tranquillity.

I’ve had a good day to day… plugging away at the animation, and even though it’s not so late, it’s time for a rest, and a party I think, that’ll be nice. Tomorrow, with any luck, I hope to make a lot of progress as the next sequence doesn’t have any particularly taxing animation, nor any technically complex bits.

Here is a tiny little test video, you can see the imaginary city starting to come together. I’m trying to play little games with perspective and things here, striking a balance between the undeniably 2D paper aesthetic we’ve got going and something a little bit more three dimensional. Do you think it works?

City Test from snailsnail on Vimeo.