Uli Meyer Animation

Going Home Doodle 29.02.12

2012-02-29T09:55:00.000-08:00

Bad Ass Pirate

2012-02-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

He was as mean and tough as the worst of them but somehow the other pirates wouldn't take him seriously.

Another personalised print...

2012-02-16T08:55:00.000-08:00

Sigmund Crow was drawn for a psychologist.

Going Home Doodle

2012-02-15T09:31:00.000-08:00

Third Arludik Image

2012-01-19T06:59:00.000-08:00

Here's the third drawing for the "The Nightmare Before Christmas" tribute exhibition at Galerie Arludik in Paris.

The House That Jack Built

The Nightmare Before Christmas Show at ARLUDIK

2012-01-10T00:43:00.000-08:00

From February the 22nd an exhibition of artwork based on the theme of Tim Burton's film "The Nightmare Before Christmas"will take place at GALERIE ARLUDIK in Paris. The show will include artwork from a group of talented artists as well as my humble efforts. It will last for a few weeks, for more details contact the gallery.

Here are two of my three pieces:

Ronald Searle 1920-2012

2012-01-03T03:22:00.000-08:00

RIP

Ronald Searle

And thank you for everything.

1920 - 2012

Scheherazade

2011-12-14T09:20:00.001-08:00

26 of 50

2011-12-13T08:32:00.000-08:00

Vulture

2011-11-15T12:03:00.000-08:00

Just to keep the blog alive while I'm busy on a project. Here's another bird.

Bonnet Bird

2011-10-13T02:51:00.000-07:00

Latest Casting The Birds print. This bird with a bonnet lives in London's Theatre Land.

Christopher Walken - forgive me

2011-08-25T02:43:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of a caricaturist but sometimes I'd like to try. Here's my attempt at Christopher Walken, one of my favorite character actors.

Lucky Charms - Early Nineties

2011-08-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

In the early Nineties we worked on several General Mills breakfast cereal accounts and one of my favourites was "Lucky Charms". When we took over the account, I was asked to re-design Lucky and take his design out of the previous seventies look and into the nineties. I loved drawing that little Irish leprechaun.

The stories always revolved around Lucky changing marshmallows into magical shapes and then kids would chase him to get the Lucky Charms. I was and still am amazed how the writers would come up with so many variations of that same theme.

Lucky Charms was hugely popular in the States (and still is, I believe) but didn't really ever take off in Europe. It was briefly in the shops over here in the UK in the mid nineties but disappeared after a couple of years. Marshmallows for breakfast couldn't compete with the good old greasy English breakfast.

Remember, these were the days before computers were used. Everything was hand painted and shot on film. To achieve the glow effect for the marshmallows, the animated pieces would be shot on the regular background and then the film would be rewound and the same artwork would be shot again on black with a diffusion filter. Sometimes those effects scenes would go through several exposure runs on the film emulsion, we called that "burning in".

We had lots of fun making these and always experimented with slightly different background stylings. Hans Bacher created the backgrounds for "Lucky's Birthday", reminiscent of Eyvind Earle. For Lucky's House we went for a watercolour look, painted by an artist who's name I forgot. Lucky's Orchard backgrounds are by Mike Cosford. The animation in these spots was done by a whole bunch of people. Apart from myself there was Shane Doyle, Michael Schlingmann, Roberto Casale, Mark Brocking and Russel Brooks.

None of the artwork has survived unfortunately, all I've got left are some low res quicktimes. Aah, memories...

Ebay Thieves

2011-08-10T02:46:00.000-07:00

"thedinogirl" is a seller on ebay offering a reproduction of a drawing of mine which I can only assume she has stolen from my blog. I have always been happy to share my work with everybody for free and was hoping that people would respect the copyright notice. Unfortunately there are too many crooks out there that try to make a quick buck by stealing other people's work. From now on I'll have to keep the images small and watermarked.

Casting The Birds Update

2011-08-04T07:54:00.000-07:00

A reminder to check out my 'Casting The Birds' blog. Almost half the prints are gone. Come and get one...

My First Commercial

2011-08-02T05:39:00.000-07:00

This is the very first commercial I animated in the UK. It was 1987 and I had just left the production of 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit". I needed to earn some money to pay my rent so I walked into 'Grandslamm', a studio that was run by Geoff Dunbar and Ginger Gibbons. They had this commercial all laid out and needed an animator to do the shots. I took the scene folders with me and rented some desk space at a small studio near the British Museum. I animated all the shots featuring the sun and Dino Athanassiou helped out with the sun flowers. Julia Woolf assisted the whole lot, I think. Stephen Ashton possibly helped out inbetweening, I don't remember exactly.
Anyway, the commercial was a big success and many others followed which were animated by someone else. I only ever drew this first one in the series. Fun times...

Count Chocula 1987-ish

2011-07-29T05:27:00.000-07:00

In the late eighties I directed and animated my first Count Chocula commercial. It was my directorial debut and the start of a long career as a commercials director. In those days directing animation involved pretty much doing most of the work on your own. Agency meetings, storyboarding, layout, animation, key clean-up, key rendering, prepping rostrum camera shoots and even sometimes cel painting, I used to do all that myself. The "producers" didn't get involved much in the making side of things, I often had to organise the ink and paint crew and hand out shots that were ready to paint. I would work with one assistant who would do all of the assistant work (in the early days that was usually Julia Woolf, a brilliant artist who now works in children's book illustration or Brendan Houghton, another brilliant artist who today works in storyboards for Live Action movies) and one Background artist.
But I loved that process. It was great to know that the little film you were making was in its entirety down to the hard work of a handful of very talented people and that you were pretty much solely responsible for the outcome. I used to work 24/7 on these things, sleeping under my desk when the deadline came close. And once the job was finished I would party too much, get over the hangover and move on to another job at another studio.
Here's the commercial, excuse the quality of the Quicktime, unfortunately this is all I've got left of it. The animation is quite ropey in places, but please remember, I was still a kid and learning as I went along.

The images below are not from that first commercial (the artwork from that one doesn't exist anymore) but are an example of a typical cel set-up of an average Count Chocula shot. The Count was drawn with a chinagraph pencil onto frosted cel, which was then painted on the back. Each cel had to be sprayed with a chemical to clear the frosting. The Background had an overlay of the layout and there is also the foreground element of a cauldron on a separate cel level on top of which another cel level of the animated marshmallows was matched to the cauldron's rim. All these levels combined were shot frame by frame under a rostrum camera. This is a relatively simple set-up, one day I'll post an example of how complex some of these commercials would get.

Hairy

2011-07-22T01:54:00.000-07:00

Drunk Moose

2011-07-15T08:20:00.001-07:00

Back to the rubber-hosey roots...
A retro design I did for my friend Paul McKeown of a classic cartoon character turned alcoholic tinsel town bum.

Early Drawings Part 2

2011-07-14T06:03:00.000-07:00

These are probably the earliest drawings of mine that are still in existence. They must have been done at around 1969/1970, I was six or seven years old. As you can see, I liked Asterix.
The drawing of a cowboy called 'Tom Berry' is of a comic book character I can't remember at all. There's a Smurf too, subtitled with the spelling of a six year old. I used to have those little plastic Smurf figurines which in my memory looked a lot better than the CG versions of the new upcoming movie.
I remember my father bringing home paper from work for me to draw on. I could never get enough paper and when I had run out, I'd doodle on anything available, including book pages and the white bits in magazines and news papers. When I look at these drawings I can remember how uninhibited I was at the time. When you are that young you can still draw free of any pressure and expectations. And even though these are very crude, I don't think any drawings I do today are as honest as the ones below.

Early Drawings

2011-07-06T01:54:00.000-07:00

There are not many drawings left from when I was a kid, most of them got thrown out many years ago. This one is a heavily pencil-rendered, unfinished adolescent fantasy which I must have done aged 16 or 17. Somebody said it looks like a Frazetta/Giger mash up and that describes it pretty well. I had a Frazetta and a Giger book when I was a teenager, so that makes a lot of sense. I grew up in a small German village and had limited access to art books or other sources of inspiration. A lot of time was spent rendering drawings to death and very little time sketching. I just didn't know any better. What was also mis-leading were the comments you'd get from most people who would be more impressed by a noodled drawing than a good rough sketch. So in order to get the praise you crave as a young artist, you tend to oblige.
Very often people are more impressed by work that involves lots of obvious man-hours and fiddly detail. Shoddy draftsmanship is often covered up by a glossy finish and I guess this is what I was aiming for here. There was one particular drawing I did, depicting Salvador Dali sitting atop a huge pile of shit, and in my memory I still like that one. But it ended up in the skip along with many others...

Just outside my studio...

2011-06-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

...you can see all kinds of people pushing through Camden Town. This greasy-haired wanna-be comedian just passed by...

Baggy Trousers

2011-06-25T07:31:00.000-07:00

1980s song by Ska band Madness.

St. T girl - fast walk cycle

2011-06-20T08:36:00.000-07:00

A test of a fast walk cycle. St. Trinian's girl follows a sailor, that little trollop...

St. Trinian's girl follows sailor, that little trollop... from Uli Meyer on Vimeo.

Outside the council estate, just after the Pitbull ban...

2011-06-16T02:30:00.000-07:00

Recuperation almost complete

2011-06-15T05:52:00.000-07:00

That virus is a nasty one. But at least I can hold a pencil again. First drawing in a week!!! The second is a doodle just before I got sick.

condom gremlin

Andreas Deja has a Blog!

2011-06-07T23:23:00.000-07:00

Finally! This will be the must-go blog for anybody interested in animation. How exciting!
Click on the logo and prepare to be dazzled...

Caught some sort of virus...

2011-06-07T06:14:00.000-07:00

...but will be posting more soon.

Cats

2011-05-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

Pencil and marker pen.

In Colour

2011-05-19T01:21:00.000-07:00

I've been teaching myself to paint with Gouache and Acrylics. It is a little different than the watercolour and ink washes I am used to but a lot of fun. Here's my first painting.

Plagios

2011-05-16T10:19:00.001-07:00

Our Dog In Havana

2011-05-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

I have just finished Graham Greene's novel 'Our Man In Havana' and thought this story would work well in the world of dogs, cats and other animals.

B,B&B

2011-05-11T07:56:00.001-07:00

Morning Warm-Up Doodling

2011-05-04T08:02:00.000-07:00

When I start drawing, the first lines I put down are usually rather un-orchestrated, as if the thing that occasionally allows me to do a decent drawing, needs reigning in first. Think of a garden hose that flops about, splashing water everywhere and you carefully work your way towards the nozzle to gain control. Anyway, that how it feels to me. A good way to start a drawing day is to doodle for a few minutes on a scrap piece of paper. I sometimes like to remember a face from the crowd that passes me by every morning and scribble away. Here's a little video of what that might look like.

Now I'm ready for drawing, hoping to stay loose and not get bogged down with life's little distractions. I'll be posting more drawing videos from time to time here on my blog.

Children's Book

2011-05-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

My good friend and talented writer Sorcha Padmore and myself have written a children's book about a little crow and hopefully I will find the time to illustrate it sometime this year! I'll be posting work in progress whenever there's something I can show.

1989

2011-04-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

Back in 1989 I joined a small team of artists that were hired to work on the development of "American Tail 2". My job was re-designing some of the existing characters and designing the new ones. I just found some old drawings I scanned a while ago. It is odd to look at the way I used to draw 22 years ago, everything was animation driven and had to be constructed. When you draw for animation, you always think about the next drawing, a terrible habit which is hard to let go off. I've got an old dusty box somewhere with more old dusty drawings and will scan them one day.

Damn Contacts! Print

2011-04-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

Here's my four colour screen print "Damn Contacts!". It is 50cm x 38cm on Somerset Satin 300gsm paper, limited edition of 8. It is embellished with a watercolour wash. £85 + shipping. This edition was done by myself and not with the print-technician from Jealous, hence there's only eight of them.

The Stain

2011-04-19T03:13:00.001-07:00

Animators Vs Earthquakes Exhibition

2011-04-18T03:43:00.000-07:00

Four of my prints will be for sale at the Animators Vs Earthquakes Exhibition. It is organised by Paul Nicholson and Sylvain Marc in aid of 'Artists Help Japan', a charity created by Pixar's Dice Tsutsumi. Make sure to check out all the amazing artwork that has started to come in by clicking

and bookmark the page to keep checking out new pieces.

The Big Draw

2011-04-15T07:30:00.000-07:00

Over on Facebook I posted a photo of an elephant, its trunk held up high as if holding something. My original idea was for it to hold a jar of anti wrinkle cream but the staging for this was wrong. So I asked my FB friends to come up with an idea of what to draw. Within a few hours there were 97 comments and lots of funny suggestions. In the end I decided to use Michelle Dunn's brain wave; elephant holding a bunch of forget-me-nots. I thought that was rather sweet. The drawing goes to Michelle, hope she'll like it...

what to add?

Moleskin Doodles

2011-04-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

New Print "Twit" and Another In The Works

2011-04-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

Based on a recent drawing I have created a limited edition of 24 screen prints entitled "Twit". It is hand-embellished with water colour and sells at £60 all inclusive. You can email me here if you're interested or go to the Jealous Gallery and inquire.

I'm working on turning "Damn Contacts" into a print. To prepare it, I draw straight onto a transparent film with pen and ink. Each colour needs its own pass and here you can see the amount of work that goes into it. Each black area represent a different colour. I'll post the result once it's done in a few weeks from now.

Inkoherent Thoughts - finished

2011-03-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

- a snippet of what goes on in my head when exploring ideas.

finally finished my collage of sketches on canvas. Off to the framers...

Self Portrait with Dip Pen

2011-03-23T04:42:00.000-07:00

Girl Next Door

2011-03-22T08:37:00.000-07:00

Artists Help Japan

2011-03-17T04:56:00.000-07:00

The payments for the next four prints of my limited edition entitled "Meow?" will go directly to ARTISTS HELP JAPAN. The cost per print is £250 and I will cover the shipping and paypal fees. Please contact me via email on uli@ulimeyer.com.

TWIT

2011-03-07T07:11:00.000-08:00

New Print "Meow?"

2011-03-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

I'm extremely pleased to be able to show my second limited edition screen print entitled Meow?. It is a hand-printed, 10 colour silkscreen print on 400gsm heavy paper, with an overall size of 101cm x 76cm and an image area of 82cm x 51cm.
Meow? was created using 10 layers of hand-painted artwork which formed the basis for master printer Matthew Rich from JEALOUS to create the individual screens at his studio.
It was very tricky to register all the colours to fit the subtle parts of the black outline but it turned out beautifully. The "Meow?" lettering is so vibrant, it makes your eyes water. Unfortunately that doesn't come across in these photos. All the colours are incredibly rich and the print is of the best fine art quality. It sells for £250 and if you want to purchase one, you can enquire at the gallery or get in touch with me directly.

Signing the first print at Jealous

I Believe I can Fly...

2011-02-26T08:17:00.001-08:00

Inkoherent Thoughts

2011-02-22T08:06:00.001-08:00

I've been cutting out and collecting some of my scribbles and doodles and have glued them onto a large canvas over the past few months. The thing keeps changing. Whenever I doodle something that I like, I keep peeling older bits off and add the new ones to the mess. This is a collection of thoughts that let to other things or nothing at all. A visualisation of what goes through my head...holy crap!

Scissorhands 20th Anniversary

2011-02-18T09:47:00.000-08:00

Sebastien Mesnard is organizing a special exhibition to celebrate the 20th anniversary of "Edward Scissorhands" and was so kind to invite me to contribute. This piece is entitled "The True Story" featuring the not-so-kind old scientist and what probably really happened.

You can see lots of wonderful images of other contributing artists on this blog and find details about the exhibition at Gallery Nucleus.
UPDATE: Picture is framed and ready to ship.

"Casting The Birds" screen prints

2011-02-04T05:50:00.000-08:00

YOU CAN SEE ALL THE BIRDS SO FAR HERE: http://castingthebirds.blogspot.com

More recent additions:

UPDATE:
Each of the 50 limited edition hand-made screen prints of 'Casting The Birds' features a unique drawing in the top right corner. Here are the first few.
The Jealous gallery in London will be selling the print for £295 but if you order one directly from me, I can customize the bird in the corner for you. Guess who number 7 is for?

one of the prints framed

‎"Casting The Birds" screen prints are finished! Now I need to paint a different bird in the top right corner of each of the 50 prints, making each one unique. Prints will be available soon...

Brandauer Globe

2011-01-06T06:17:00.000-08:00

Sketching with an extremely flexible, vintage Brandauer Globe nib and Indian Ink on Bristol board.

An old one, slightly re-worked...

2011-01-05T08:11:00.000-08:00

"Young Love"
pen, ink and potato print

The Early Days - Part 1

2010-12-23T06:41:00.000-08:00

Back in December 1990 I moved three animation desks into a small, dingy, back room office in Bulstrode Street, just outside Soho, in London’s Westminster area. Uli Meyer Animation Studios were born, I was 27 years old.
At first we called ourselves "Ulimation" but after my business partner Ashley McGovern and I decided to part our ways a year or so later, I changed the name. Luckily!
In those days all you needed was a desk, paper, pencil and a pegbar, and you were ready to offer the world your animation skills for hire.
To pay the rent, we took on some work on “Ferngully, the Last Rainforest” (Dave Bowers and Bibo Bergeron had briefly left Amblimation to help out with the animation) but I knew that in order to survive, we needed to get some advertising work.

Uli in 1990/91 at the Bulstrode Street Studio.

I was convinced that based on my reputation as an artist (whatever that means...), advertising agencies would be knocking on our door sooner rather than later. It turned out it wasn’t that easy. I had successfully directed commercials for other studios before but it took nearly six months until I was able to convince Saatchi & Saatchi's in New York that I could handle producing a commercial as well as animating it. Jacques Dufor, who was the creative in charge of the General Mills account at that time and someone I had worked with before, eventually gave in to my persistent pleas and sent me a Coco Puffs storyboard to quote on. After a week or so of nervous, nail-biting waiting by the phone, we got the call to say we had the job. Three months later the first commercial entirely produced at my new studio was delivered to a very happy client and years of work for Saatchi’s New York were to follow. Unfortunately I do not have a copy of that first Coco Puffs commercial nor do I remember what it was called. We used to keep copies on 35mm but with the arrival of the digital age, a lot of the prints were dumped into big skips along with hundreds of boxes of animation artwork.
We recently started digitizing old U-matic tapes and here is the opening part of an early showreel we used to send out to clients, which would be followed by entire commercials. I think it must have been put together in 1993 or so, since there are a few shots from commercials done at my studio as well as animation I had done at other studios prior to setting up my own company. All the animation was drawn by myself. Dammit… I used to love animating.

Bear with me...

2010-12-13T05:36:00.000-08:00

Drawing of two crows whilst I'm getting the bits together for the next post.

Stone Prints

2010-12-02T13:35:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago I completed a three day lithography course at the London Print Studio. I've got a couple of Ronald Searle's wonderful lithographs and wanted to learn how they were done. I won't go into too much technical detail here (you can read about the process here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithography) I just want to say that the whole process was enormously enjoyable. I would recommend this to anybody who doesn't mind getting their hands dirty and isn't opposed to a bit of physical labour (those stones are pretty heavy!). You draw straight onto the stone at the print studio and can't make any mistakes since it is impossible to erase any part of your drawing. All you can do is remove minor blemishes during the second etch. Today I drew my first stone and here is the result. I still have a lot to learn about how the drawing materials turn out during the etching process but that is the exciting part; you'll never know exactly what you're going to end up with.

I'll be posting future efforts...

St. Trinian's Animation Test

2010-11-26T04:37:00.000-08:00

On September 22nd I presented a 25sec animation test featuring a St. Trinian's schoolgirl to the creator of those classic British characters, Ronald Searle himself. Searle has had a few bad experiences when it comes to animation -his drawing style is extremely difficult to adapt and apart from a few short pieces of animation done by Ivor Woods in the 70s, he hasn't been impressed by many attempts. Nevertheless, I thought I'd give this a go and am so very happy to report that he approved! He even commented that it was the best he’d seen since Ivor: a truly wonderful compliment.

The original St. Trinian's cartoons are spot gags featuring the terrible killer schoolgirls and their teachers at the notorious, albeit fictional, boarding school. They commit murder, blackmail and extraordinary naughtiness against the backdrop of a supposedly more innocent era - 1945 to 1952.

There isn’t a story. Searle’s anarchic humor works as a single image – not obviously lending itself to animation. Therefore, I picked one of the cartoons and added a little lead-up story.

Matt Jones and I boarded a sequence which was originally longer than 25 seconds and involved a massive crowd scene in the St. Trinian’s dormitory. But I decided to keep it simple - it was meant to be a test after all. Based on the boards, I drew the layouts and posed the shots on 8s and 12s. The wonderful animation is by Sandro Cleuzo, who animated the first shot and Boris Hiestand, who animated the rest.

My job was to keep the whole project in the Searle universe. I drew the BGs onto frosted cel, each one five times to give the environments a slight boil. I then drew the character animation onto frosted cel with a mapping nib and black ink, trying to keep it as loose as possible whilst putting the characters on 'Searle' model. The animation is mostly on ones and I managed to get through 40-50 drawings per day. Helene Leroux, a very talented young French artist, traced the last shot. Loose lines further produced the ‘boil’ effect, which goes well with the Searle style.

The drawings were then scanned and composited by Michael Schlingmann in After Effects. Michael figured out a complex system of mixes to keep the multiple background drawings alive and in style with the lively lines of the animation drawings. We added a mix of existing music to the edit, hoping the composers won't mind since this is not a commercial project. The little film was great fun to put together - a welcome opportunity to remember those dusty 2D animation skills.

Maybe there will be more one day...