Blog: Do, Darren, Do

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I've spent many MANY happy hours over the past couple of weeks beavering away on the forthcoming video for Don't, Darren, Don't, which we'll be releasing in about a month's time.

This one's going to be a semi-animated affair, similar to the one we did for Theme From Dinosaur Planet, with the artwork provided by the inestimable Mr John Allison. This time he created a special COMIC STRIP for us, a small preview of which I can supply to you, THUS:



If you know the song you can probably guess which section that covers! It's a beautiful piece of work ANYWAY (NB the artwork, i would not dare to presume to say so about the song hem hem that is for others etc etc) but I've come to appreciate it even more by... well, MESSING ABOUT with it. I soon realised that the panels in the artwork are all roughly PORTRAIT sized (the ones above are less so than most), whereas your modern YouTube video is much more letterbox/LANDSCAPE sized. I was already going to be doing some delicate CUTTING OUT on the pictures to make parts of them move, but this meant i had to do quite a bit more than I expected, especially for backgrounds where LINES had to be continued past the original borders.

I managed to (almost) always do this using existing BITS - I didn't want to spoil the GORGEOUS artwork with my own clumpy hands, so there was quite a bit of cutting and pasting lines from elsewhere, and it was here that I was most IMPRESSED. Everything WORKED. If I had to use, say, a FOOT of a character from one panel in a DIFFERENT panel, then good golly but that foot FITTED. Everything was done thoughtfully, exactly, and with care, it was really rather beautiful. Also, of course, getting up THAT close to it made me realise how DELIGHTFUL all the details were, and how ALIVE it all felt. He really is awfully good at this drawing lark!

The video's NEARLY finished, with some tweaks and wotnot to be done, and then I've got a press release, mailing list, webpage and so forth to get on with, aiming to UNLEASH the finished package on the world ready for the newsletter at the end of JULY. It may seem to be a way off yet, but FEAR NOT, gentle reader, this is going to be worth the wait!

posted 27/6/2012 by MJ Hibbett

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