Francesco Giannotta

It's finally time to talk about a project that has taken a lot of my time for a long time. Let's start from the beginning. The main idea of our pre-production module is to work on a film, that may or may not be produced, to improve our story and design skills. Of course, me and my friend Sarah decided to go crazy with it and pitch a film about masturbation. A one-song musical, to be precise. So meet Toby, an enthusiastic masturbator that gets carried to a musical tour of hell by an overly passionate Devil, after he caught him with his hands in the 'dirt'. In his tour, he is going to meet many different characters, that end up in that dreadful place for their sins. Toby and the Devil I really do not want to tell you more about it at this stage. It's important to keep a little bit of mystery. All I can say is that I've written a song, I am getting some music for it and my friend and I cooked up a poster that is pretty self-explanatory. Hope you like...

The project that I'm most proud of is definitely the Live brief. We had to project an advert for Shelterbox, a charity that delivers shelters in zones where it's needed, with a target of children from 7 to 11 years old. I produced the project, and worked on it with a team of six talented people: Alex Bloxham ( http://bloxsdoodles.blogspot.co.uk/ ), Felix Flook ( http://felixflook.blogspot.co.uk/ ), Dan Fretwell, Stephan Georgiou ( https://stephantheportraitdrawer.blogspot.co.uk/ ), Ashley Gibbins ( http://animationash.blogspot.com/ ) and our director Jamie Gonzalez ( http://themarmaladeking.blogspot.co.uk/ ). It was exciting and we worked so well together I hope we'll have a chance to do it again at some point. We tried to make it so that kids all over the world could identify with our little character. So we made them blue. And without any gender connotation. And bald. We tried to keep the design as plain as possible, to make it both cartoony / good for comedy and t...

At the end of last year, I decided to specialize in design and pre-production. We did some writing / story workshops and we then had to pitch our story. After that, some stories got chosen to be developed, with storyboards, a script, artworks and concept designs to then make a production bible of a never-to-be-actually-animated project. The idea I pitched is about a skeleton that drives a train to hell and a hitchhiking goat that doesn't know where it's going. It's comedy gold, believe me. I forgot to mention, my project has to be inspired by George Grosz' work. Which is, as you might be able to tell, a pain in every aspect. So here's a painting I did for this project: And here's the finished test shot I did with my coursemate: Unfortunately, I lost my usb drive. So I'll post more work about this project later on.

Animation is a hard, frustrating and long process. But we all know that. The exciting bit is when you can finally see your finished work serving the most important task of all: telling a story. Well, I decided to work on a film called Towels, directed by the incredibly talented Prawta Annez ( http://prawta-annez.blogspot.co.uk/ ). It's a beautiful short film that I can't wait to actually be finished and come out! Here are some test animations I did for the project, I was still trying to figure out the proportions of the character at this stage (now I've got it all figured out, I swear!): I have animated two shots so far and I'm working on my third one. I can't show you those now, but I will be able in the future. Until then, check out the film's official twitter account to be updated! Also, special thanks to Camilla ( https://camikj.wixsite.com/animation ) who's the best producer ever.

Surprisingly, the project I enjoyed the most was the 3D one. We had to build a wild west enviroment with buildings and everything. The modeling was the most relaxing part and, even though texturing and UV unwrapping was a bit long and tedious, I'm happy with the result. The texturing process also gave me time to listen to a long list of good albums that I wanted to listen to. Here's the finished work. There is also a velociraptor with a hat hidden somewhere in my scene. It says "henlo Georg" on the side. I textured it with a poorly adapted picture of a horse. His name is Glen.

We had one job: make a title sequence for an imaginary film. We were a group of five people and everything went wrong. I'm not going to bother anyone with the whole story of how it went downhill, but I'll just explain the project, our idea, and what I'm proud of. We had a long brief and a lot of different made up films to choose from. We could have chosen a sci-fi one, one about the dada movement, one about fashion magazines. Me and my group decided to work on a historical biopic on female aviators. The idea was really simple: we were going to show a little girl's room. We wanted to show how even a little girl during present days can be inspired by the great women who made history. As simple as that. Unfortunately, we don't have a finished project, but here's some beautifully lined backgrounds by my friend Jamie ( http://themarmaladeking.blogspot.co.uk/ ) that I coloured.