Tentacle wishes all a very Happy New Year…. bring on 2012!

All the Best

Tentacle Christmas Animation from Tentacle Media on Vimeo.

Zero-G wins best animation at electric december! - Sponsored by the great guys at Aardman! Look out for its world screening on christmas eve!

A nice little mention by Watershed – read more…

Tentacle have been lucky enough to work along side companies such as Pearson and BT to help make the campaign a real success.

Difficulties with communicating can affect children and young people severely and for life. In areas of poverty, over 50% of children start school with delayed language skills. This puts them at a huge disadvantage to their peers as they struggle to learn and make friends.

Tentacle’s main aim was to create the Hello animations and videos to help people around the nation become familiar with the ever growing problem young children face with communication.

Our first animation was called: ‘One in a Million’ It focused on outlining the main problems of speech, language and communication.

The animation was created entirely in Adobe After Effects.

Our second project was to cover the Hello Shine a Light Awards 2011. Throughout the year hello has noticed the outstanding efforts and achievements of people & organisations around the UK. Tentacle was given the challenge to film finalists and show how they have helped the campaign throughout the year.

The final film was screened at the awards ceremony in London.

Photos from the awards 2011

View from 10th floor

James & Mike

Another city scape!

James and Mike with Jack Marshall (Young Person of the Year)

After its completion we wanted to get as much feedback as we could, taking it to schools and companies across the nation. We were overwhelmed by the comments it received,  we decided to enter it into various film festivals. It was unsuccessful in some but, Festivals such as The Royal Television Awards & The Electric December, Zero G sits proudly in the nominations for 2011/12…… yeah!

Zero-G

Zero-G from Tentacle Media on Vimeo.

The Making

The script was adapted from a longer version we wrote a couple of years ago. We had a few techniques we wanted to try out so adapted the script to suit. We still wanted to be entertaining though. As you can see the sketches are pretty… sketchy but they were for our use only so I wasn’t to bothered.

The armature I designed in Solidworks and made over the course of a weekend. It’s a bit Heath Robinson but he didn’t need to do that much movement and I figured a lack of movement would be synonymous with Ridley, the character. I actually ended up remaking the hands as they were a bit bulkier than we wanted. We also had a problem when one of the fingers broke inside the silicone. Not wanting to buy any more silicone we ended up making some small flying gloves for him. This allowed us to take them off and replace any broken parts when needed.

The Body was padded out with foam and the clothes glued on (I can’t sew).

The sets were created from anything we could lay our hands on, The strange camera rig in the picture is a telescope tripod with some aluminium extrusion. It seemed like a great idea at the time but was a bit unpredictable. I think we used it for one or 2 shots, all other tracking we did on a glide track mounted to the ceiling.

The entire second half of the film was shot against a green screen and composited. This was mainly due to a lack of space. It also meant we didn’t have to build an entire earth set, we just built parts of it made the whole thing in Photoshop.

I could go on forever about the making and please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions. There are more pictures on our flickr, and I have a load more that I’ll upload at some point.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/56359917@N06/

Thanks for reading,

James

The New:

The Old:

Tentacle Flip Sting from Tentacle Media on Vimeo.