Inspiration Spot

We are introducing an “Inspiration Spot’ to our newsletter mail-out, in which we highlight an interesting thing that has caught our eye….

This great little historic film clip shows how the creative spirit can turn the humble typewriter from a machine of words into an expression of visual creativity!

‘Able to tick? Tick Along’ Film from 1937 Polygoon-Profilti (producer) / Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (curator) Licensed under Public Domain Mark

Eleanor joins the fantastic Female Founders Scale Up programme

I am really excited to be one of fourteen entrepreneurs to be selected for the Female Founders Scale Up program run by Creative Enterprise (with the BFI and National Lottery).

2022 Female Founders cohort

We are embarking on a 6-month programme designed for female business owners from the narrative screen-based industry, which includes tv, animation, createch, and scripted and branded content companies. In its third year, the programme provides in-depth support, advice, and professional coaching tackling areas including business planning, funding, strategy, making the right hires, and monetising IP.

Having already met up in-person, I am really looking forward to working alongside these women, in developing opportunities both personally and for Tapocketa.

You can find out more about the programme here.

And find out about Erica Wolfe-Murray of Lola Media, our fantastic coach, who is leading the course here.

Get Animated: How to find your animated replacement

We would like to enter NED - Love Machine into festivals and competitions.  There's only one problem, well two actually...us.

While NED is currently a delicious mix of animation and live action (not to mention Oscar-worthy performances from yours truly) it makes it less 'animation-y' to have real people in it.

This also becomes a bit of an issue when the live action is at the beginning. This was deliberate, the whole element of surprise is the transition into the animated world. Unfortunately this also means that when a panel of experts sits down to watch our beautiful animation, the first thing they see is…er… not animated. We would like to think they wouldn’t switch the film off in disgust at that point. We would like to think that they would have confidence that we, as professional animators, would not be so silly as to enter a live action movie into an animation competition or festival. I have to say, we’re not confident that would actually happen.

Therefore, we reluctantly take one for the team and stand aside to make way for less attractive animated versions of ourselves. I know, it’s not going to be easy.

If you would like to keep up to date with our progress, we are regularly (currently every other Sunday) broadcasting live at 5pm (BST) for around 10-15mins.

The next one will be on Sunday 26th July at 5pm British Standard Time (9am PDT, 12pm EDT) where we will be showing our progress and talking sound fx.

Click the image below to go to the YouTube page where you can book your place by clicking ‘notify me’. See you there! :-)

Tapocketa’s Live at Five Sound FX

We love broadcasting live, it gives us a chance to show you our progress and get live feedback (if you want - you can just watch - if you’re a bit shy, don’t worry, we don’t see who’s watching - it’s not like a Zoom call - more like a live TV programme).

If you would like to keep up with new Live at Fives, follow us on social media or subscribe to our YouTube channel...

Tapocketa's Live at Five begins!

What goes on behind the scenes of a slightly unusual animation duo?

How do you start creating an interactive animated story?

Where do you look for creative inspiration to give your stories richness and depth?

Join us Live at Five every other Sunday at 5pm BST!

We take you through the process of creating interactive stories as we create them.

And because it is a live broadcast, you get to ask questions while we are broadcasting.

Our next session is on 12th July. Follow us on social media to get more details about each session closer to the broadcast date.

Here are the first two sessions. It takes us a little while to get into our stride!…

Live at Five session 01

Live at Five session 02

Tapocketa speaking at Digital Book World, Nashville 2019

This is exciting stuff. We will be presenting our work and last year’s multi-award winner ebook ‘Galdo’s Gift: The Boovie’! We are also going to be showing an exclusive …the trailer for our next project ‘The Locksmith’.

The line up is impressive, and we are delighted (if not a little daunted!) to be part of this astonishing array of influencers from the digital book industry. It is the big event on the digital book calendar and we intend to make the most of it; soaking up the extensive knowledge on offer, connecting with some fantastic people and generally taking in the buzz of the industry. And of course, hopefully have time to find some great Nashville sights and sounds too!

To Affinity and beyond.....

We’re featured on the Affinity Spotlight ! Wo hoo!

So the ‘Affinity trinity’ is 3 programmes developed by Serif which are 1. fantastic, 2. very affordable and 3. a great alternative to some of the corresponding Adobe suite.

We use Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer as an integral part of our animation work flow and, to be honest, couldn’t do without them. The programmes have a very intuitive structure which makes using them a dream.

The tools are clear and placed for ease of use and there is plenty of help in the form of the Affinity community.

Affinity Publisher is the latest addition to the gang and promises to be very useful for our work to print and layout needs.

All in all, we love Affinity and, it turns out, Affinity love us and our work. What could be better?!

Follow this link to read the article on the Affinity Spotlight site.

Project diary - The Locksmith, Aug 2019

Initial rough sketch of mechanisms layout

We’re currently working our new project ‘The Locksmith’ and are making a trailer for it first; to let people in on the feel of it and to hint at the subject and the suspense involved….

So it does of course include some locks. Not quite your normal locks, oh no, this is a collection of intricately moving mechanisms that link and connect, latch and oscillate. It’s been fun working out the what and the how of it and I started by drawing out shapes that would move and nudge each other in an interesting way.

This involved quite a lot of trial and error as far as the specific shapes and mechanisms were concerned and I wanted to keep a hand drawn and asymmetrical feel to it rather than the clean strategic shapes of machined cogs and dials etc. After the initial sketches I launched straight into making a paper model, this being the best way to actually find out if the shapes could or would work together before taking into the computer to recreate each piece for animation.

In the video below I show you some of the sketches and paper models I made and how, by using pins bent and snipped as joints, I trialled some of the arrangements and sequence of motion that would give the desired result.

A brief glimpse of behind the scenes of our next project; paper mechanisms, and maquettes.