Angela Kirkwood

0:08 Um hello H hello I'll just say just this h Hello H thank you everyone for coming along today so H yes my name is Angela Kirkwood I'm an illustrator and animator from Edinburgh so just a little introduction about my work I love to create these sort of H bright the real illustrations and animations that have a real sense of joy and Nostalgia that runs through them H so I'm really interested in creating these sort of zeny Worlds that are filled with really expressive Oddball characters and I love to explore that through animation.

0:46 But it's only really in the last two years H that I've been full time with illustration and animation and getting there was a lot of trial and error H so I did study illustration at University but I entered the world of work as a graphic designer working in Creative agencies and you know at first it was a job that I you know really enjoyed but as the years passed I did start to feel this Rising sense of misery I was working you know a lot on you know working long hours on on projects that I wasn't finding totally inspiring and I was just starting to feel really kind of burnt out and a bit creatively unfulfilled and I started to think you know maybe working in creative agencies isn't really for me so after a zoom call with my boss that went slightly Haywire I decided to quit on the spot which was excellent because I was free but also terrible because I had no job yes thankfully I did manage to get by by doing the odd bit of freelance design work but really during this time I got a lot back into drawing not with any plans to become an illustrator but really just for my own kind of personal enjoyment and as I drew I started to have these overwhelming feelings like wow you know wouldn't it be so good if these drawings could move you know had ideas for characters and scenes but you know really no idea how to animate what is animation so some of you may be familiar with this book the animator survival kit by Richard Williams so I picked up this book after hearing you know that really it is the book to help beginners in animation you know it's filled with lots of notes and diagrams on how to make moving pictures but it almost had the opposite effect and that H I almost gave up an animation before it even started because of this book H okay.

2:55 So the book begins by you know a SP espousing the importance of you know being a master at draw and you know really it's most important that you're an excellent drafts person you know with a really good understanding of form and Anatomy before you should even attempt animation and you know.

3:13 This is something that could take years or you know maybe even a lifetime I remember you know looking over to my Sketchbook at the time which looked like this yeah I I just remember thinking e you know I remember thinking wow I really would have loved to have done animation.

3:37 But I guess that dream for me is now dead out of curiosity I did flick through further chapters but things only really continue to deteriorate first with an anecdote about how to draw a supposedly gay walk and then illustrations that describe the feminine walk which were you know quite sexualized with a ballerina a fashion model and a stripper as examples but probably my favorite part was how does one draw perfectly bouncing boobs well Richard has you covered so you know at this point you know.

4:22 I started to realize like maybe I shouldn't take this H book totally as gospel you know and that maybe I could also disregard that opening chapter that had made animation just seem so you know Out Of Reach and you know unattainable because really I just wanted to do animation for fun side note I should say you know well the book H does have a few problematic stereotypes and is definitely of its time it did actually have some quite good notes on things like timing and wait FYI close brackets okay.

4:53 So from that really I decided you know what I'm just going to try and learn animation myself through through trial and error so this was one of the first animations that I' created it was quite simple really just on procreate so and I approached it in a process called straight ahead so whereas normally you would maybe first draw in the key frames and then fill those with like in between frames it's a more linear process and that you start with the first frame and you just kind ofo go straight ahead you know. So it tends to make things warp and you know feel quite sort of fluid and you know you can get kind of more unpredictable results so when I was creating the animations you know it was important that I just didn't really have too much of a plan but it's seing like where do the drawings take me sometimes H that would involve you know using prompts to help create animations so you know writing a list of words and putting them together to create like a nonsensical story which I would then ♪

5:58 animate ♪

6:15 [Applause]

6:18 but yeah like I I remember when I oh thank you yeah I remember when ID first created this. And I was like wow you know like you know seeing all these characters and scenes that had in my mind just come to life like it just felt so magical and just like I don't know overwhelming and for me that kind of like process totally makes like I think an creating animations is often quite a laborious process so it totally just makes up for that.

6:45 And I just love that sense that you know like anything is possible and you know really the only limits are your own imagination so a big part of my exploration you know is finding ways to imbue characters or inanimate objects with personal ities you know so through how they move you can really kind of get a sense of their mood and for me. That's like one of the most exciting things about animation it's like that art of movement and you know rather than thinking about like just what moves it's it's how something moves that can you know really communicate the idea or or the feeling so during this time you know. I was just really inspired by you know the things that are around me.

7:24 So this was inspired by HH he is a labador that I was dog sitting for a while and you know every time we took Kish out for a walk people just love to stop to talk to and to pet him.

7:37 So I imagined him as this sort of pied paper H figure but with a saxophone H and you know and crowds of people follow him wherever he ♪

8:17 but yeah. So you know with this again it's really just all about that like experimenting with movement I had been too impatient to copy any of the Walk Cycles from the animator survival kit.

8:27 So I really just like tried to kind of make my own and I remember when I like played it all back together like I just burst out laughing because like I didn't do it on purpose like I didn't expect them all to all be so you know unhinged but I I actually turned out okay because you know adds to that kind of like sense of of Chaos in the animation.

8:49 But yeah I don't know for me like through a personal projects I really realized like there's no right or wrong way to do anything and actually I found like embracing my limits like not knowing how to animate properly has actually led to way more interesting and fun work and you know the flaws and Imperfections are actually what gives the animation you know the character and the personality and I think for me you know it's just trying to have fun and like enjoy it you know what I'm making and you know I love creating these characters have just got loads of personality and I feel like I'm just you know keep trying to build this sort of Wacky World.

9:27 So I was very excited to be invited along with five other artists last year H to create window displays H for self fridges so the theme was centered on celebration and the concept was to create these sort of Otherworldly shop fronts that reflect the Departments within the store so it was very exciting because you know up until now most of my work had been scream based but it's also so exciting to have the chance to make something you know in real life and also like at such scale so because the windows are almost like you know mini rooms it wasn't just thinking about the usual color and composition but you know also like depth and and placement of each element and you know how perspective might affect things.

10:59 So this was the final window so you know it for the optician so it was thinking you know who might visit this optician you know perhaps some sort of you know glamorous fashionista characters you know just kind of having fun so this was for Dolly's Cafe so you know another important thing to consider when designing the windows is you know fun ways to showcase the actual products themselves and I guess another kind of part of my work is like I really like to anthropomorphize H objects and you know give things facial expressions and just play around with you know inanimate objects you know and you know giving them lots of personality and Char character and you know just feeling like as though you could just imagine the characters just sort of Ooo like jump jumping into life.

11:02 So this was the entrance to the Manchester shop it's quite hard to get in fan pictures but I think in person you know the the this year sort of scale combined with the color is quite visually arresting and you know you really kind of almost got that sense that you're like entering this like Fantastical other world.

11:18 So the campaign continued through the store in mles I created lots of these characters as well that were sort of all hidden around the the shop all it sort of different scal so some were larger we had some sort of little smaller creatures hidden around and again it's just considering like how do these illustrations like you know.

11:40 Actually interact with like the environment or the products around them and finally so this was in the center of the London store it's a sort of celebratory scene that expands over sort of four floors so you know more is revealed as you sort of go up the escalators but that is just a little into my journey H thank you so much for listening