Thursday, August 24, 2006



Hello again.

As promised you can now see some of my work. The images I'm putting up in this post come from the year 2000. The name of the project was called 'Pet Shop' I started sketching ideas while I was working on 'Christmas Carol the Movie' for Illuminated Films.

At first I wanted to write a book based on the alphabet which went through and listed one animal from each letter and have a funny poem\story attached. I soon realized that Dr Suess had already done this, so I stopped. Then in 2002 I meet Paul Parkes, a script writer who I later did King Arthur's Disasters with. I showed him my ideas and sketches and we instantly hit it off! By then end of one night we had come up with a synopsis.

It goes a little something like this:

In every episode three spoilt, witless children, bored beyond reason, decide to purchase an animal from a local Pet Shop. However, they never return with a normal pet! Ranging from every creature, such as a huge gorilla with a killer instinct - to a cranky untamed giant scorpion. The training program to domesticate their new pet doesn't always go according to plan. But then, the animal's survival instict is nothing compared to three bored, determined children.

In my next post I'll show you some of the lines from the scripts and more images.You can see how violent it really was!

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

A little bit about myself

Hello,


A brief history of the man called 'William Ashurst' I was born on 30th November 1975 just outside London and then all of a sudden 19 years had passed and a Teenage Mr Ashurst was studing a degree in 2D Animation at UWE in Bristol, UK. Didn't learn much. So I applied to the London animation school in 1998 to learn the trade, got in, had a great time, learnt alot and meet lots of new friends blah blah blah...Worked on films, adverts and TV series and then everybody fell out of love with 2D. I found myself having to learn 3d computer animation. In the meantime I was developing new ideas and formats for Kids shows with a good friend of mine, Paul Parkes. Eventually through hard work and perseverance one of the ideas was picked up by Zenith Entertainment and CITV. It was called 'The Chronicles of King Arthur '(working title). In April2005 King Arthur's Disasters ( Final name) premiered on CITV and it was a unexpected success. The 2nd series will premiere this September.

While all this was happening I got married and then got my Norwegian wife ( an animator too) pregnant. We were both working in Leeds for a computer games developer as animators\concept artists and decieded we both wanted to bring up our child in Norway. We moved over from the UK in January 2005 and ever since we have both been working for Funcom ( Games Developer) as animators and parents to our crazy, mad , loveable daughter, Maren!

I'll post images of my work soon. You can see how the original character designs I designed for Arthur changed throughout the development of the show and some other stuff!

Speak soon!
Hello!