Adding lip-sync to my last two characters. I’m going for more expressive beaks, so this is looking like a scene between Groucho and Margaret Dumont.
Groucho Grebe
Month: September 2021
Duck Storyboard
Assembling cast, sets and opening titles for my cartoon.
Your Average Duck
I’ve been looking for the average scruffy duck: an adult in eclipse, a juvenile moulting into adult plumage or a part-domestic duck. I’ve taken the colours from two ducks that I photographed by the war memorial at Newmillerdam last week.
Tufted Duck
The last of the supporting players, the tufted duck is taking shape and I’ve made a start on the main character, the hungry duck.
Ode to a Duck shouldn’t take long to put together now that I’ve got all the elements together. The animation shouldn’t be much longer than 60 seconds.
Speckled Wood
The dappled markings of the speckled wood, resting on a bramble leaf, echo the dappled sunlight in the welcome shade of The Pinewoods, as we walk up from the Valley Gardens, Harrogate, on the hottest day since July.
Addingford Steps: green spaces
My Addingford show in the Redbox Gallery in Horbury comes to an end later this month but I’m following up its theme of the importance to us all of having a ‘local patch’ in my November ‘Wild Yorkshire’ column in The Dalesman.
Rather than it being just me saying how much I value this stretch of the Calder Valley, I thought I should quote one of the many studies that suggest that being in nature can benefit our physical and mental health. This study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA was made before the pandemic, but seems even more relevant now:
Green space can provide mental health benefits and possibly lower risk of psychiatric disorders. This nation-wide study covering >900,000 people shows that children who grew up with the lowest levels of green space had up to 55% higher risk of developing a psychiatric disorder independent from effects of other known risk factors.
Residential green space in childhood is associated with lower risk of psychiatric disorders from adolescence into adulthood, PNAS, 2019
Pike and Perch
We’ve got most of the Newmillerdam ecosystem appearing in Ode to a Duck. It took me a while to work out how to stop my characters floating around – you simply pin their feet to the background – but that hasn’t been a problem with these two.
Joining the swan for the prologue, this Canada goose. I haven’t given him moving eyes and eyebrows, but he seems suitably goose-like without them.
Swan Screen Test
In my animation, the swan is anything but mute as it introduces my Ode to a Duck.
Having now produced several ‘puppets’ using the Adobe Character Animator template, I’m much more familiar with the basics and more confident that it will actually work. There are plenty of optional tweaks that I could introduce but for this animated cartoon I’ve stuck to face-on characters which don’t walk or fly about, basically they’re talking heads.
Castleton’s Iron Age God
This two thousand year-old ‘Iron Age God’ presides over the National Park Tourist Information Centre in Castleton.
These bison bones are from the Pleistocene Ice Age, more than 10,000 years old. The bison leg bones were excavated at Windy Knoll, a mile and a half to the west of the village, at the top end of Winnats Pass.
Figure of Three
I think that you can see that John Smeaton, engineer on this stretch of the Calder & Hebble Navigation, had previously worked on lighthouses. This 250 year-old stonework withstood the ravages of the Storm Ciara floods in February last year, but the spillway and the island were scoured away. A £3 million repair project took a year to complete, delayed by the coronavirus outbreak.
On our school cross country, my friend John and I used to jog – or more probably saunter – through this echoey underpass beneath the railway. As we were wearing our football kit we could imagine that it would be something like this in the tunnel at Wembley on Cup Final day. Not that we were keen on football: for me 90 minutes wandering along the school cross country route was preferable to running up and down the pitch. We knew all the short cuts, so we didn’t have to run all the way.
We cross the Calder here, at Healey Mills, but at that time there was a riveted steel footbridge, now replaced by this box girder bridge.
Our cross country route took us down the hill behind the gasworks and through the hamlet of Healey Mills. At that time people lived in this small terrace at the entrance to the mill yard.
We sometimes had a bit extra to our route because the school playing fields were another quarter of a mile from the school in South Ossett.
