it's that time again...

Happy Christmas... I always make my own cards, and I always make a christmas animation. why? because it's FUN. Because home-made gifts are the best in almost every case; they come with more love, more thought, and an investment of time which is most of my friends' most precious commodity. Mine too.
12 days of Christmas from Fin McMorran on Vimeo.

in other news

don't get mad...get animating

...people are trying to kill us and other people are writing racist nonsense all over my facebook feed. Hard to concentrate on gentle human comedy when you kind of want to jump around and scream. I could make scathing animations about the EU (Im in by the way) or defiant, solidarity-in-the-face-of-fascist-bigotry cartoons about Colorado...but Im trying to stay sane and, in the words of one of the speakers at the Newcastle vigil, "be the best queer you can be"...which in my case means finish the damn movie.
But now I have typed this, I'm immediately thinking, doesn't it also mean making the animation be mightier than the sword (or the machine gun). It does. Yes, it does.

art...love...obsession

plus they have cracking sheds in Swaledale
(field barns actually, in Gunnerside)

so Henry Miller said that to paint is to love. and  I have just spent two days walking in Swaledale, loving the scenery, the wind, the sound of the sheep calling to the lambs, the extraordinary variation between the desolate, charred moors and the intimacy of tiny becks, with wood anemones under ancient moss-shaggy trees...

but I wouldn't want to paint it (too hard to attempt any improvement on nature? Lots of painters do, and some manage to put the love, the passion, the pride and a sense of enormity into it. I do take photographs...)

and I definitely wouldn't want to animate it (no story?). But this scenery is full of stories! The story of stones, of sheep, of communities...the timelapse story of the life of the land, mountains shrugging human endeavour off their backs and flower meadows washing over the greenfields and away again like waves on the sea...but unfortunately, as much as I love these places,I am doomed to make ludicrous animations of talking sheds and flying grannies. I love them even more.