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It took far longer than I ever imagined it would, but I finally got OOT finished. It took the best part of a month to record the voices, do the animation and edit the whole thing together. Check it out here.

The Christmas message is done, but it’s only a fraction of what I’d intended to put in it. When it gets to midday on the last day of production and you’re still finishing the first minute’s shots, you have to bite the bullet and start thinking of ways to cut it down a little.

The lesson we’ve learned in the last few days is that the run-up to Christmas is not the best time to assign yourself a mammoth stop-motion animation project. I’m not particularly happy with it, but at least I got it out before Christmas day.

OK, so I lied. My first proper film has a name now - “Out of Time” (OOT for short). You can download the trailer now by clicking the picture above. Please note that this trailer is completely made up, doesn’t really tell you much about the story and contains no actual footage from the film. Enjoy.

The music at the end is from “Jesus Built My Hotrod” by Ministry, fact fans.

These were all done under poor lighting conditions with a cheap l’Espion digital camera, so bear with me. They’re mostly tests that I did to get the hang of animation and/or effects. They’re all encoded with DivX 5.0.2, which you can get from www.divx.com. I don’t think any of them are over 10 seconds long. Enjoy.

• My very first animation - Riverdance
• My first walk cycle
• My first run cycle
• A Mexican wave - works best if you loop it
• Busting the phat beats
• An attempt at animating 4 characters at once
• Fun with chairs
• My first fx shot
• The obligatory light sabre fight
• My first drunken stagger cycle
• Zombie rising from the grave
• A ghostly skeleton menaces an unsuspecting victim

I should probably mention that I have next to no LEGO. If you’ve downloaded these files, you’ll have figured that out by now.