Memorabilia Day two

So here it is the second day report from my recent trip to the LG arena for Birmingham's Memorabilia event.

When booking the tickets I had insisted that we go for both days, though on the second morning I was feeling concerned that there would be nothing to do and we would have wasted our money. Fortunately the second day was even better than the first. 

The Hall was far less busy on Sunday which was nice as it allowed us to look at the stalls with greater ease although there was less atmosphere. We started the day by doing a lap around the arena to see if there was anything we missed the previous day. 

On both days there were lots of people dressed in Sci-fi, cult and movie costumes. The good thing about it being quieter on the Sunday was it allowed more time and room to get photos with the people in costume. I had my photo with some clone troopers and Alan had a photo with Darth Vader.

We decided to fill our day up we would check out the talks on the main stage. The speakers who appealed the most were Michael Biehn, the Starwars crew, David Hasselhoff and Craig Charles. Each speaker was allotted 20 minutes and the format was largely the same for each. The host would introduce them, ask questions and encourage the audience to ask questions. 

The Michael Biehn talk was interesting although he didn't seem to thrilled to be there. He spoke about starting a film production company and how much easier and cheaper it is to now make a film. 

The Starwars crew consisted of Boba Fett, Greedo, the rebel pilot with the black moustache from a New Hope and the Storm Trooper who said the line “these are not the droids we’re looking for”. I was reluctant to see these guys as I didn't think it would be very interesting. As it turned out they were great. Lots of funny stories, very charismatic and entertaining. 

Next up was David Hasselhoff, who was another talker who I wasn't that fussed about seeing. I know that the "Hoff" has a large cult following but even just the nick name puts me off. I was never particularly a fan of either Knight Rider or Baywatch, I only liked Yasmine Bleeth who while a teen consistently made my various celebrity top 10s! We went to see him as there was space and we wanted to see Craig Charles who was on after. David Hasselhoff was meant to start a 1PM though was running late, it turned out he was running about 30 minutes late. The host stalled by dishing out lots of freebies which ranged from tat to some DVD's, I didn't get anything. 

So the Hoff finally turned up at about 2 to a packed audience took the microphone off the host and began talking and didn't stop till about 2.40. The host struggled to get him to wrap up and kept trying to bring the Q&A to an end. The Hoff was fantastic very charismatic, full of energy and just really funny. He was very honest about himself, his career and seemed keen to recapture the glory days of Knight Rider. I still wouldn't pay £25 to shake his hand and to write his name on some of my property but  I would definitely like to attend a similar event with the Hoff.

The last speaker was Craig Charles of Red Dwarf and Coronation Street who was another highlight. He was consistently funny and had allsorts of fun tales about Red Dwarf and Robot Wars. He explained that Robot Wars was cancelled due to the robots becoming to big and powerful which obviously created lots of health and safety problems. It was a shame he didn't have longer to talk as it was all really interesting.  

We finished off the day by checking out the last Robot Wars which was again really entertaining. Then had a final walk around of the stalls. I purchased some comics, clothes and a mug. The next Memorabilia is some time in March and then the big London Comic Con is in May I'm planning on attending both of those after having such a good time at this event. Advice to anyone planning on going to any of these events in future, take a packed lunch as mostly on Saturday there were long queues for food and the prices were vastly over inflated!

Memorabilia Fair Day One!

Memorabilia 2012 Day One

I attended the most recent Memorabilia fair at the LG arena in Birmingham on the 24th and 25th November. It has been years since I've attended an event like this so was looking forward to it. I don't buy comics or toys any more though I still enjoy that culture and the atmosphere. 

I attended with my two friends Pokemon Master Alan Kwan and the film maker Malcolm Kennedy. We had early entry tickets for both days. On the first day Malcolm and I arrived at 9 to be greeted by a disorganised mess of a queue, the attendants sent us form one side of the queue and back again. Once finally in we had a wonder around until Alan joined us (he was travelling from a different location to us). 

Upon entry we were given a free 50th anniversary issue of Spiderman and a program, posters were on offer but we didn't want to carry these around. The stalls were selling a wide variety of merchandise and collectables. It was cool to see a mix of toy dealers and smaller start up businesses selling custom made merchandise rather than the over priced “collectables” as a lot of stands were selling. I appreciate old toys that are mint in box are expensive as they are hard to come by but I find it ridiculous that a Batman figure fresh off the production line can have such a high price tag. 

The smaller custom stands were selling limited edition designed posters, t-shirts, mugs, clothing, console cases etc. It was awesome to see these stands as all of them were being manned by the designers and makers of their products. We got chatting to some of the owners of these stands and its far more satisfying knowing that you are giving the money directly to the products designers. 

One of the stands I bought an ace super hero mug off was Head shot clothing. The lads on the stand were super friendly and had loads of great stuff definitely worth checking out.

In the middle of the arena were all the celebrities asking for £15 to £25 for 30 seconds of their time. They ranged from actors from Starwars, Only Falls and Horses, Michael Biehn and David Hassellhoff to name a few. There were even some glamor models who just about managed to cover their nipples (well done them). 

Dalek made by Robots live and a house robot

As we worked our way to the other side of the arena we found the Robots Live ring. As far as I could tell this was the same as Robot Wars from TV, I assume they had to change the name for licence reasons. We watched one of these events. I was never to fussed about Robot Wars when it was on TV but seeing it live is totally different. Its really good! The first robots out were the smaller light weight Robots that were mostly wedges with flippers on. These were really fast and chucked one another all over the ring. Next there were boxing robots and they did a segment I think was aimed at kids. Then the final part was the heavy weight Robots and were again predominately wedges but these were even more satisfying to see fight. They're all much bigger than I imagined, it was really exciting seeing such powerful robots smash one another up. 

Around midday the arena began to fill up and it became very crowded so we decided to get lunch. Malcolm had brought sandwiches with him so me and Alan began to look for somewhere to eat. There was a Subway straight outside the arena but it had huge queues. We settled on the Weatherspoons but it had a special LG menu that was very expensive, we were going to buy some paninis but they had sold out, it turned out anything under £10 had sold out. So we had sweets and fizzy drinks for lunch. 

In the afternoon we continued looking around the stalls and made a few purchases. I bought some canvas prints, DVDs, postcards, a Megaman keyring and a Pokemon league cap. The event finished for the day at 5PM then we headed home. In a couple of days I’ll post my report on Day Two.

Batman preparing for a poo!

Animation Journey

Hello I've decided that this post will continue the new start to this blog and give some more background about how I was led to a career in animation. I'll cover some of my influences and things that inspired me along the way.

Growing up I was interested in cartoons, sci fi and fantasy. My favourites were cartoons like Transformers, Thundercats and pretty much any other violent action cartoon. Even now I remember seeing both Transformers on Wackaday and Thundercats which Im sure debuted on a Sunday night which is a bit weird. As a child I wanted to be either a barbarian or Optimus Prime briefly after watching Top Gun I wanted to be a Jet. Both the title sequences for these series were so cool, exciting, iconic music and slick animation. Having watched the shows more recently these are the only parts that are any good. If you still think either of these cartoons are very good your mistaken.

As with all cartoons they had all sorts of tie-ins films, toys, cloths, comics etc. I sporadically bought comics of all sorts of stuff Spiderman, Transformers, Zoids (which I recently re-read and its a great read) Thundercats etc I settled on collecting Thundercats Comics which I have most of a run of the first 100. The Zoids comics features excellent art and even early work by the awesome Grant Morrison

check this out its really good apart from the abrupt end

I settled on Comics as my passion and my goal became to be a comic book artist. In the UK during the 80s Marvel UK produced loads of original comics so I could see a direct route to the career. For me Cartoons and Animation was unachievable. I felt quite detached from the production method as it was behind a screen and out of reach, I had no means to reproduce what I saw on TV. Comics I could hold read, draw and create myself.

My big problem with toys was that you never had all the figures, I used to cut out the characters I hadn't got and stick them to card with bases to expand my ranks of Transformers. 2D cardboard Transformers were quite limiting as they were flat and didn't Transform. When I decided that didn't work I began making Transformers out of Plasticine. This worked far better to the point that I just played with Plasticine Transformers instead of the toys. As well as having a complete collection of Transformers I had all the Marvel Heroes and all the Turtles (and blue peter inspired sewerbase) all made from plasticine.

At school I took Art as an option. Then progressed to College continuing with Art though expanding to study Graphics, Jewellery, Printmaking, Ceramics and Media. I never really enjoyed Media as we had to use Macs which I couldn't get my head round plus I just didn't like using computers. For one of the projects we had to book out a digital camera and take photos of letters. I had left it so late that the cameras were all booked out. As I still had to do the work I bought a cheap digital camera with some Argos vouchers I had won from my job at Mcdoanlds. The Camera did the job and it had an animation feature. Rather than exporting the images as individual photos its was possible to export them as a short quicktime. Then you could add effects in paint. This was my first attempt at Animation. Unfortunately I no longer have any of my early attempts at animation though they were probably amazing works of art. The project I bought the camera for also turned out to be my first film project.

The project was a creative presentation of collected and made images of the alphabet. Rather than just handing in a pile of images I filmed all the images. I held a toy rocket on a string and made it fly past the alphabet for a simple narrative (it was very crude). At this stage it still hadn't occurred to me I could be studying film or animation. I imagine based on my work up to now it was probably looked best for me to avoid this route.

While looking for Universities I was planning to continue with Art and do a fine Art course. It wasn't until looking at a prospectus on the journey home from Wolverhampton I even realised you could study animation at University. I changed courses at the last minuet and did Visual Communication at UCE (now BCU). On this course I studied both live action and animation. I had a go at drawn which i found to be soooo painfully boring that I only produced a handful of drawn animations. I think I still have them on a mini DV somewhere, if I ever find them I may put them online for people to laugh at.

I switched to stopmotion as this is the best one and most fun to do. People often say you have to be patient and it takes ages but I find it pretty instantly rewarding. Within a couple of frames you can have a puppet come to life thanks to your work, I find it very quickly gratifying. Then the more you add the cooler it becomes. This is why I dont enjoy creating drawn animation, you have to sit and draw the same thing over and over and its not until you scan or film it that you can properly appreciate what you have done. I have a lot of respect and time for drawn animators and their great work. The other cool thing about stopmotion is your basically playing with toys and plasticine. Its not quite as fast as just playing but you no longer have to imagine your toys coming to life you are actually bringing them to life.

Okay thats the end for now. I'd like to spend more time in the future writing about specific animations and films that I either think are great and worth checking out or things that have really been an influence on me. I think this covers how I got into animation though.