A Dog & Another Dog

I did finally finish painting The Dog. Now I'm waiting on some special wooden bases to arrive from England and then he's complete.





Also, Dogstar has been nominated in the Logies for 'Most Outstanding Children's Program'.

Remember that post I made over a year ago saying I was making models of the main characters from Frankenchicken? Well, let's just say that time passed rather swiftly without any progress until fairly recently. Happily, I have just gotten another model at the ready-to-paint stage:

I use Daas over a wire and polystyrene skeleton that I shape and sand back. He's pretty much ready for painting.
Some points about his character:
He was modelled on a friend's beagle that, alas, is no longer with us. The Dog's character is pretty dour but he has reason. He was once a therapeutic animal for patients in a children's ward at a hospital, but with closure of the wing, was consigned to an experimental laboratory. There he was used as a test subject for an artificial vocal device and titanium teeth. The former was developed for humans that have lost their own vocal chords and forms part of the collar around his neck. The advantage of this prototype is that it is not locked to any particular voice, so he is able to mimic pretty much any sound he hears. This makes him an excellent choice to head Communications, hence the earpiece and microphone. The titanium teeth was a trial for police dogs that had previously damaged their own teeth in bringing down suspected criminals. I believe this is actually a true experiment that was done. For The Dog, it merely allows him to be even more intimidating.

An (Indirect) Award!

An episode of Dogstar that BigKidz animated on for Media World Pictures, Hounded, has won the award for Best Animation at the Asian Television Awards held in Singapore earlier this month. That's nice. Our thanks and congratulations go to the funsters that worked with us on this episode, as well as our gratitude to Media World Pictures for giving us the chance to work on the series alongside a number of extremely talented people.
Dogstar is currently screening on the Disney Channel in Australia on Sundays at 5.30pm. Bazzin'.

It's Been A While

Time passes. We get older.
But in the meantimes, photes!
Last night we had the good fortune to be attending two parties: one to celebrate the (not quite finished) production on Adam Elliot's feature Mary & Max, and the other a birthday party for a friend of ours, Dave Blumenstein. Thusly, you get to see the pics. They do go on forever, I'm afraid!

Dizzly & Neil from Square i
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Kelly
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Adele
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Kelly
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Ann and Dizzly
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Adam Elliot, Kel and Ann
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Adam, Kel, Ann, and Melanie Coombes
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A thank-you Noblet.
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Dogstar Screens Again

Fortunately Channel 9 here in Australia have decided to re-screen Dogstar (we did animation on 9 of the 26 episodes) every Saturday at 8.10am. The previous run was interrupted by the cricket and I'm not even sure they completed screening the series. But now that it's back on, worry ye not!

Dogstar website.

A Few Last MIPpics

Courtesy of Justin Wight at Monkeystack:

Kel & Ann
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Justin & Kel
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Ann & Justin

Progressional Models

I'm in the process of making little models of three of the main characters from Frankenchicken. I had relatively good success with FC himself, so I thought I'd try with the others too. I modelled them first in plasticine, very roughly, to check the chapes and masses before doing the base in polystyrene and wire, on which I'll put the modelling clay on.

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Sorry, I had to hold this one up cos his plasticine legs are inadequate to the task.
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