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Some of you might recognise these two...

Horrible Histories Behind The Scenes

Want to know more about how Horrible Histories was made? Then look here!

A nice quick documentary piece for children, which includes animation director for Triffic Films Tim Searle presenting (and very nicely I might add) a pencilled storyboard drawn up by yours truly for a comedic sequence about Roman Catapults. Hope you enjoy it!

Sophie In The Souk

Mr Ben Campbell of Rampage Studios gave the me rather fun opportunity to design a title sequence for his new series, Sophie In The Souk, earlier in the year. I did a few illustrations for it, including some more cartoony work I'll put up later, but the biggest part of the job was going through the thousands of production photo's in order to create full 1080p HD montage backgrounds through Photoshop and Illustrator. He had a very particular vision of what he wanted it to look like, and given how messy montages pictures can often look, I'm happy that we managed to find a clean look that doesn't look cluttered or confusing.

Tim at Like A Bull At A Gate, who previously worked on Pepper Pig, then did an amazing job of taking the puppets and backgrounds and creating a super-snappy animation from them which you can see at his website here. All of this was done to a very, very tight schedule of less than a week for both the design and animation, and Tim also created some little interstitial animations involving gags with the two main protagonists (as above). Two other artists, the very talented Ana Bermejo Santos and Caroline Parkinson were also involved in creating some animated scenes and map segments.

It's currently airing on the Travel Channel (click for more info and a clip) and as far as I know, is going down a storm. Congrats to Carlos and Ben at Rampage.

More concepts...

Just some unused concept art that lead up to some final designs that I sadly won't be able to publish.

Poetry Pie hits today at 4.55pm on Cbeebies!

Triffic Film's Poetry Pie finally hits the screens today - and I'm a bit excited. Well, one of the reasons that I worked on it and had a great time, and also because apparently Childrens Laureate poet Michael Rosen also likes it! Anyway, here's the link to the website. Hope you enjoy it!

http://www.poetrypie.com/

See the first episode on iplayer (UK only) here.

Filmore continueth...

... just had a quick fifteen minutes, so now... more Filmore! Updated as usual when they're done.

Some conceptual designs...

Just a few drawings from something I'm working on (will update later). All copyright (c)2009 Benedict Edward Bowen. Older designs below, newer designs above.

Gorman (now Filmore)

This Gorman character cropped up as an injoke meme on an internet forum based on an urban dictionary reference. Then it suddenly took on a life of its own, and Gorman was born... since then I've changed the character name to Filmore to differentiate it from the original meme, and will update the above strips with the new name.

More old boardwork...

Just a small section of a board from Friends and Heroes Series 1 (I think), which is about three years old now (if not four). These boards were pretty hefty, weighing in at around 350 pages per episode. This section is a bible story for a CGI section, hence the shading, and were done quicker and looser than the 2D main sections, which were on-model.

Very Quick Pitch Boards

When I say quick, I mean really really REALLY fast. Got the job on a Thursday night and delivered Friday lunchtime. Phew! Anyway, not the best artwork I can pull off, but I want to put something on here that shows at least quality delivered in a very short time frame that received good feedback from the client. They needed to be presentational boards, which meant a bit of pressure to make sure they were clean and read well - I am happy with the line quality and shading, gives them a bit of an American indie comic look (even if I had to stop on the floor shadowing due to time constraints)... not so happy with some of the figure drawing, but hey, it reads.

All the artwork was done straight into the computer using a cintiq monitor.

This was done for Agile Films' Davina Abrahams from a treatment by director Lucy Cash for a Comic Relief pitch. The reason the fellow in the van wears an "X" on his hat was because the celebrity in the short hadn't had been selected yet (although he's got a bit of a Johnathon Woss look about him).

PITCHBOARD REMOVED - Job back on

Storyboard Samples

Well, I AM a Story Artist by trade. I'll be putting up some samples from previous clients for television projects. I'd love to put up more but naturally it depends on the client and copyright... as I'll only add something that's not in production and has made its way to screen. The first here is Planet Sketch series 2. I'll admit it's quite a "flat" board, but that's the Aardman way - earlier ones were ditched because the dynamic angles didn't fit in. Instead concentration was put on the acting and keeping everything concise, clear and above all - funny.