Today marks 10 years to the day since I launched my animated Clerks fan-film, INACTION, a moment which ultimately led me to where I am today.
Based of course on Kevin Smith’s classic film and criminally-underrated cartoon series, with Stephen Silver’s incredible designs, and animated to one of Jay Mewes’ expletive-laden diatribes from Clerks 2, it was a labour of love that I started in the new year of 2014 and worked on full-time for four full months. I did everything - modelling, rigging, animation, lighting, rendering, compositing, editing (some of those things more successfully than others, sure)
I’m still very proud of this and it really laid the foundations for what I would move onto do in my career. As it was my first animated short, many of the things I learned to do specifically for this would be part of my skillset when I moved into Hollywood film previs animation two years or so later, for JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM.
The thing I wanted to do next was a BATGIRL fan-film, and I wrote my first feature-length script for it, but it was way too ambitious and ultimately shelved -- but some of the tools and techniques I developed would be dusted off six years later, when I started work on PRAZINBURK RIDGE.
And of course, while making that I also worked as Previs Supervisor on the actual fuckin’ BATGIRL movie with Leslie Grace -- and Michael Keaton as Batman -- a life goal complete before it was cruelly removed for us all.
So from INACTION (1), to designing the iconic shot of the Indoraptor on the roof (2), to that fuckin’ slow-mo shot in Hobbs & Shaw that nobody asked me to design but I did anyway (3), to BATGIRL (4), to designing VFX set extensions for DEADPOOL & f’n WOLVERINE (5), to winning awards for my new film (6), and now prepping for my own live-action feature... and I can look back at INACTION, ten years on, and say, “that is where this all started.”
Snoogans.
