One of the hardest questions for a lot of people in the animation world is the simplest: what do you do?

The endless skill-set involved in animation means you can apply yourself to almost any job. I’ve at various times been a Designer, Concept Artist, Animator, Director, Writer, Sound Designer and Editor. I’ve always been happy in every role, the only reason I spend so much time film-making is that there isn’t another Director who would do the same ideas. Nonetheless, I meet a lot of other Directors who have a different interpretation of the role, and it seems to have lost much of it’s original meaning as Film Maker.

It used to be perfectly acceptable to call oneself an Animator if you made films, but then these individuals started using Director to distinguish themselves from the production line Animator. It seems the problem now is that certain Directors need to distinguish themselves from the production line Director, and there simply is no definition available.

Today, Director is such an umbrella term it ceases to describe anything meaningful. Many Animators, Illustrators and Designers try on the Director gloves, this can sometimes be a great thing, but it nevertheless changes the definition slightly, terms like ‘animator/director’ or ‘director/designer’ have become quite common in the last 5 years. There is also a greater number of production companies than ever before, with rosters changing like the weather. Whatever status and cachet the term used to carry is undoubtedly fading. In London the presumption of a Director is that he or she pitches their heart out and barely gets by, in Berlin it’s that they work in a cafe. (Read more…)

I recently reopened the Oekaki Board, where you can leave drawings using the built in paint software. The technology is relatively ancient but it can produce some beautiful pictures.

Also, all of the videos on this site are now served in glorious high definition, there are some new t-shirts in the cafepress store, as well as a bunch of minor updates to the site.

Here’s an illustration to brighten things up:

This has to be seen to be believed.

It turns out my much loved character Octocat has a massive underground following in RUSSIA. I just got sent links to a hoard of over 700 pieces of new fan art. His Russian homepage, as well as archives of the work can be found here. I’m not sure how many people are behind this, but from that site it seems to be coming from the home of Russian memes 2ch.ru (visit at your own risk).

The images are mostly based around one of the first pieces of fanart by a Japanese artist, and he has now been put through every permutation possible. This is about as humbling and amazing as it gets. People are actively using him to express themselves. Instead of passively absorbing it they are giving it new context, using him as a mirror for their ideas. Some of it is beautiful, a lot of it is controversial, and most of it… I just don’t have a clue.

I’m not quite sure how to meaningfully put together all this stuff, the fanart page is too big already…(a book??)
You can browse through about 670 images below using Microsoft’s new PhotoZoom technology…(you need you download the Silverlight plugin, it’s worth it)

While I don’t want to inflate this too much, it’s important to give it perspective. There are hundreds of trendy self-described “character designers” out there, and this kind of thing is their wet dream. They believe character design involves sticking arbitrary shapes and characteristics together, then marketing the life out of them to other designers and affluent grown-ups who still play with toys. It seems the only qualifying factor in these characters is whether they look “cool” or not. You can market something all you want, but if the idea doesn’t resonate it will be hopeless.

There is still a steady flow of Octocat art from the capitalist West.. here is some recent stuff including a beautiful Christmas tree decoration, a Spanish comic (translation??) and one from my friend Moto.

If you have no idea what Octocat is, someone wrote a new, quite detailed article about the whole thing here.

- Дэвида Орейли

It’s official, Please Say Something will receive its world premiere at the 2009 Berlinale!

The film is finally complete, it’s 23 episodes long and the sound and images have been entirely revised and remastered since the first few were originally put online. It’s just a completely different beast with a new lease of life… I should especially thank Bram Meindersma for all his music and audio work in aiding this process.

I will also be doing a talk at the festival, sharing the stage with world famous artist Michael Snow. I guess we will be discussing all kinds of things. The talk is on the 9th February.

In other news, my film RGB XYZ will play at Rotterdam this year, and my work once again found it’s way to US tv screens (video @ 0:33), some quality reporting there.

*photo credit: Chun Yang

Happy New Year everyone. To celebrate I’m giving away this 100% free 3d model to use in your own productions.

It’s licensed by Creative Commons and free to use and manipulate any way you like, commercially or otherwise.

You can download it as a zipped .obj file here.

Walt Disneys Head by David OReilly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.