Frombald eating his breakfast

My registration is getting better but I'd like to do some tests with an optical printer to establish the stable parts of the shots - beds, dead bodies, wallpaper, plates with sausages etc. Then I could rubber stamp just the moving parts.

On the move at the Estorick

We visited On the Move, Visualising Motion at the Estorick today, it's a very good exhibition curated by Jonathan Miller, which connects Giocomo Balla and the Italian Futurists with Marey, Muybridge and Beano's Billy Whizz of course. Through the paintings and photos the show elegantly illustrates the theory that our experience of looking is strongly influenced by what we expect to see and what we know. I especially enjoyed seeing Muybridges lovely zoopraxiscopes and magic lantern slides and the stroboscopic photos of Harold Edgerton. It's worth going up to the top floor for the Morandi drawings and etchings too.

















Billy Whizz from the Beano

















Densmore Shute Bends the Shaft, by Harold Edgerton, 1938. Courtesy The Michael Hoppen Gallery

There's not been much to report from the bog recently. I've been working on the script for Frombald and there's nothing to say about it, I'm doing a lot of rewriting and I'm not there yet. Sometimes if I don't work in my studio for a while I have to remember to flush the loo because the water in the cistern goes a bit green. I've begun teaching on the animation module at Anglia Ruskin again, which I enjoy very much, because I can watch a lot of great films with the students and think about ways to make the process of animation clear and interesting. The students are new to animation, so they start with zoetrope strips and after 12 weeks they come up with a 1 - 3 min stop-motion work of their own, an exciting process to witness.

I have worked with Mark Jenkins on all of my films, even though he now lives in Orkney. He's a splendid person and a brilliant picture and script editor and now he's blogging too.

Back in the bog

I had a full day in the studio yesterday. It's been a little while, I caught up with Smiley on iplayer whilst I made some clear leader and printed some images of Frombald onto it. I also had another go at the script and now Frombald's journey bears an uncanny resemblance to Lightening McQueen's in Pixar's Cars - self satisfied town dweller at the top of his game learns something from simple country people, in this case muddy, hysterical country people.