Animation

Since a very young age I have been extremely passionate about animation and the idea of bringing my artwork to life. When I was a teenager I would make flick books and scan drawings frame by frame. But it wasn't until 2020 at the age of 30 I finally realized that teaching myself how to animate was not completely out of reach and I started following online courses. At first for Cinema 4D and then in 2023 I made the switch over to Blender.

Since then I have been learning nonstop how to take full control of my characters, taking them from design into a fully functioning 3D model. I have now learned sculpting, retopology, texturing, rigging, weighting, hair dynamics and most importantly motion capture and am at the most exciting phase of my journey so far which is bringing them to life.

While I am still in a very early phase of my journey and my work is not perfect I am ecstatic at how far I have come because animation is hard to learn especially when you are working alone and its has taken me years to get this far, but I believe I am just beginning to truly find my feet and I now have several characters that I have rigged and ready to play with. As I continue to build characters I hope to develop a library that I can pull from to tell stories in the future animating my own short films.

I have an instagram account called FIXATEFINCH specifically for animation where you can follow my progress, just click this link:

Below are some example of the work I am doing and further down is a preview of my first short film "Aphasia"

FIXATE FINCH INSTA

SHORT FILM - APHASIA

A project I have been working on for almost a year now which is very close to my heart is a short film about my father who is now in his 70's and is a retired academic. My Dad was an English professor and earned a doctorate in English language. His greatest passion being writing and his greatest love - poetry.

When he was 55, he suffered a very bad stroke that completely debilitated him, affecting his speech, language, and physical abilities. Whilst physically he was able to recover somewhat. The biggest difficulties he faced afterwards and still to this day have been due to aphasia, a condition that disrupts your ability to speak and communicate efficiently.

However, after the stroke he found that while he struggled with speaking and typing, his mind remained sharp and his ability to write poetry was intact even if it was harder to use the keyboard he was still able to slowly write. Despite the challenges he has continued to dedicate himself fully to poetry. He is now preparing to publish a new book called After a Short Illness, a collection of poems that reflect on his experiences of living with aphasia.

I thought the idea of somebody writing poetry about having Aphasia whilst suffering with it made for such a beautiful and painful concept that it deserved to be made in to more than just a book and I began developing his words in to a short script which I could animate to help bring more of an audience to his work but also to help others understand how it is to deal with Aphasia and hopefully help raise awareness for Stroke victims dealing with the same difficulties.

Below are a few short clips blending 2D and 3D styles from the short film I have been making for him which is currently 7 minutes long and will be released in November 2026 alongside his book of Poetry "After A Short Illness"

MONSTERS

Part of my fantasy in all of this is to design cool monsters for my "heroes to deal with on their journey". I have always been obsessed with dark fantasy and directors like Tim Burton and Guillermo Del Toro are the masters of this world, I take huge inspiration from them. I have always love designing weird and wonderful beings and scary monsters. The designs I'll share below were early tests but once I have completed my short film I plan to get back to making monsters in greater depth and taking all the new found skills I've acquired since making "Aphasia" and putting that new knowledge and stylistic nuance in to my monster characters as well.

MUSIC VIDEOS

As a musician the idea of being able to make my own music videos with animated singing characters was always extremely appealing to me as well. This also ties in to the idea of making an animated musical. As an early test back in 2023 I made this little video for a song I had been creating (but never released) called "Walking Inside". I have had 3 years more experience now in character animation and I can definitely see how this was less advanced but I still love it and actually I think the style of the character actually really suits the low grade level of animation in a way that presents an oddly spooky tone for the song that matches the music.