Well, that’s that. the Viz Blaps are now in the can. And by that, I don’t mean we flushed them down the toilet.

The final week was mental. Fucking mental. Fucking completely fucking totally and utterly fucking mental. It would have made one of people who goes into a school with gun look quite normal, that’s how fucking mental it was.

Animation started to come back from our animators thick and fast. As mentioned last week this was to be composited by me. Depending on the complexity of the animation, I could compostite a simple twenty second piece together in a couple of hours. A more tricky piece however could easily take me an entire day. And I don’t mean a 9-5 day, obvioulsy. I mean, quite literally, an unbroken period of 24 hours.

As one piece was done, more would come back in it’s place, like those sodding brooms in the Sorceror’s Apprentice. In an attempt to keep on top of everything I worked solidly for a three day stretch with about five hours sleep in my office chair in total. It was really a very grim time. I became half man, half chair. A Chairman, if you will.

The final straw came on the final evening. I had one more piece of animation to put together – our Elton John sketch. As our voice track had come back last for this one, coupled with other knock on effects, the animators had started work on this right at the end. Most pieces were animated by one person – this piece was split and sections were animated by every animator we had left on the job. As such I hadn’t seen any completed animation until it came back to be composited. The idea of sending it back for changes was out of the question, so I was very hopeful that the animators stuck rigidly to my keys and that it would look okay, and not like it had been done by five or six different people.

When I saw it, thankfully, it looked great. If anything, better then everything else. As our animators do more and more, they have been getting better and better themselves at teh Viz style. Massivley relieved, I started to import their work into my composting software and settled in for one last all nighter on the final piece of animation, safe in the knowlegde that I would meet the next days deadline.

All went well until suddenly one of the files decided it was no longer going to be recognised. Then another. Then another. And another.

I restarted and all was fine. So I worked on. And then it happened again.

Hoping it was a software issue, I transferred everything across to another computer, and continued work. And it happened again. SHIT.

I called up Dennis, our main animator and the guy who was wrangling the other animators. We tried to work out what was going on. It transpired that the animators were using different versions of CS. Some were on CS3, some CS4, some CS5. And in the process of aligning all the output togther, a load of bugs had crept in. Adobe doesn’t really like to make things back-compatable. Thanks, Adobe. If I ever meet mr Adobe, we’ll see if my boot is back compatible with his arsehole.

So we shit ourselves a bit. Exhausted as I was, I suggested we just drop the sketch. Dennis was in a bit more of a fiesty mood, and suggested we battled on to see if we could fix it. We located the files which were causing problems, and, after a few hours of to-ing and fro-ing, managed to isolate them, and Dennis would tinker at his end and send me through some bug free files to patch in.

It was all going well until one of Dennis’s bug free files caused the software to crash. At that point it was 4am and I had to sleep. My eyes were stinging and hurt to look at the computer screen, my back and ribs were aching and I needed to go to bed. I think I was becoming paranoid too. But then I’m sure everyone thinks I’m a twat anyway, so it was hard to tell.

I got four hours sleep, and felt worse for it, as I really needed about four days sleep. I spoke with Tim as soon as it reached a sociable time to do so. He breezily said “Oh, well, we’ll just drop it then”.

So it was dropped. An email went to Channel 4 to explain, and a reply came back describing it as an embarrassment of riches.

All my renders now needed sending away. To upload them to the Baby Cow FTP would take hours, if not days, and so Baby Cow sent me a 1TB hard drive, and arranged a courier to pick up the files and send them to London, physically. That photo above is the masive van that was sent, and the tiny hard drive they delivered in it.

The drive went off and I collapsed into a lovely sleep. When I woke up my head was working better, and I realised that I knew a way to solve the Elton John issue. It would have taken hour sthat I didn’t have to make the courier collection, but now I had more time, I could do it, and to stick one cartoon up on the FTP would take a relatively short time, compared to sticking everything up…

And so, after a good few more tense hours, Elton John was finished. (It required rendering off all the individual SWF files as image sequences, if you must know. That could be done before the files decided to crash the software but was time consuming). Safely finished, I found out it had been a bit more painful fior Tim to drop Elton than he intially had liked to admit, so getting it done after all was doubly rewarding.

Tim grabbed it off the FTP and set about claging everything together. All the cartoons came from me, but he was also getting ‘Letterbocks’ from the talented, award winning Mark Nute, and title stings and ads from the also very talented Shane Barrel. Music was coming in from Tim’s choice musicans, Rob and Arnie of Voodoo Kazoo. Live action Profanisaurus, which had just been recorded, was being edited at Baby Cow. And Simon Couzens, who we initally recorded the voices with all that time ago, was sorting us out the audio. I was on call up in the North to help solve any last minute fuck ups, of which there a couple, but it all got sorted in the end.

Phew. And that’s that. It’s gone from being fucking mental to being totally quiet. In a way, I’m really happy it’s finished, because I desperately need a break from it. But obviously I’m quite sad it’s over, and I can’t wait to get into it again, should we get the chance to do some more. Which we all really hope we will… Watch this space for details of when the Viz animation go live!!

Also, I’m now doing a talk about my time directing the Viz animation in Barnsely for Animated Yorkshire. Please come if you can, it’ll be fun, and I’m thinking of putting a picture of me naked in the slideshow. But don’t let that put you off.

Link here: http://www.animatedyorkshire.co.uk/

Also , my Vic Reeves anition has gone up live on the BBC, finally, after a far too long wait. As a result, I want to do another blog post about that, which I’ll do sometime next week when the thing has had a chance to breathe a bit online. In the mean time, check it out. I think it’s the best piece of work I’ve ever done, frankly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e585SRgCNxI&feature=digest_tue

Another week of keys. Work seemed to progress a little slower this week, in that I was finishing keys for animation at a rate of one every two days. Previously I had been cranking out the keys at a fair old rate of completing one set per day. However, I have been leaving the longer segments until last, so I’m probably getting through just as much. I now have one last set of keys left to bang out, for a cartoon based on Davey Jones’s ‘Elton John’ character. I’ve been working flat out on it. You could say I’ve been ‘burning the candle in the wind at both ends’. At least, if you were an unfunny twat you could say that.

Admittedly not one of Viz’s ‘big hitters’, I’m really pleased Elton John is going in. Channel Four wanted some nod to ‘celebrity’, and as a concession to them, it’s a good one. Yes, it’s a celebrity cartoon, of sorts, but the character is far removed from any tabloid style take. Plus it helps that it is incredibly funny (as all of Davey Jones’s work tends to be).

Simon Greenall popped back in to the recording studio to have a bash at Elton John’s voice. It is brilliant. It had me yelling with laughter. He has managed to add another layer that you can’t actually achieve in the comic. Next week I’m off to Manchester to record the final batch of voices with a a very popular and funny stand up comedian lady. I’m not saying who she is incase I jinx it and she drops out. But fingers crossed she doesn’t and I’ll be safe to name her next week once we have her voice on tape and backed up!

We have been given a deadline now, too. Which is fast approaching. Channel 4 have asked us to supply some high def stills from the footage for them to use in publicty. Unfortunately we’re not at a point were we can take stills yet…! So I have dutifully knocked out some special bespoke images today. And here they are, in glorious low resolution so that I don’t get into trouble.