Sometimes...

New York, New York!

My finned friends will be visiting Brooklyn, New York this coming July 31. Yepp, Abstraxion - Vampyros Lesbos is being screened at the 2010 Animation Block Party!

I thought I'd share some sketches of the fishy denizens from my initial story pitch so you can see how they've.. uh... evolved!

2Up Tracks

For those of you wondering what I do for fun besides making coffee, drinking coffee and playing Warcraft, here's part of the answer. A couple of summers ago, I started touring the region with Oliver on his motorcycle.

We documented most of our rides with photographs and satellite tracks via GPS. Over time, we decided to build a website to share our adventures.. so here it is!

While I designed it, Oliver did most of the backend coding for the site, including a nifty autohotkey script that grabs pictures from a folder for a particular ride and generates the page from a template.

Stay tuned, because there will definitely be more rides to come as the weather warms up!

Abstraxion - Vampyros Lesbos

Abstraxion - Vampyros Lesbos (2010) from Choom Lam on Vimeo.

Last August, the talented Abstraxion of Biologic Records contacted me about animating a music video to one of his tracks, Vampyros Lesbos. The liquid, hypnotic sounds captivated me right from the first listening and conjured these images in my head. I hadn't had the opportunity to do traditional pencil-on-paper animation since my student film at VFS so it was great to be able to dust off the animation desk and practice flipping again. This was probably the most fun I've had drawing and scanning stacks and stacks of paper.

Rethink Happiness Goes South...

...Literally! I just found out that it's been chosen to be part of the Reel Earth Environmental Film Festival in New Zealand this May. So if any of you happen to be in or around Palmerston North next month, please drop by!

Back to The Beginning

One of the things that's kept me busy these past few weeks is a collaboration with Amanda Healey and Taura Hanson on their final project. They're both students in the VFS Digital Design program and are building an interactive version of "In the Beginning" for mobile devices.

On my end of things, I'm illustrating the book of the story which ties in with the interactive games via Augmented Reality. The illustrations will serve as "tags" that the camera on your mobile device picks up, triggering an action in the game. It was an interesting challange to create these illustrations because the cameras needed clean, sharp edges and clearly defined black and white spaces in order to recognise the images. Too much detail or not enough contrast and the camera won't respond reliably.

This clip was inadvertently made by Amanda as part of the game. It's bunny doing what bunny does best... hopping.

This little gem aside, they've done an insane amount of work to transform the film into an awesome, interactive, bunny infested universe! Bunny pinball anyone?