Illustrations for Exam Board Film Studies Resources - Film Practitioners

Pencil
January 2016

Some days, it just falls in your lap. I was contracted to write some film study resources for a new exam syllabus, and while in one of the meetings with the lovely Department Head, she happened to mention that because of copyright and licensing, they had trouble getting access to images - film stills and so on - to help illustrate their resources. Without thinking, I said "I can draw you some if you like", doodled her a reasonably detailed pencil sketch of Alfred Hitchcock and suddenly I had a separate contract to provide pencil illustrations of forty film practitioners - directors, animators, editors, sound designers and cinematographers - to adorn the new film study resources.

The process of producing that many illustrations fairly quickly was everything one might expect - a long slog, good fun, a learning experience, immensely frustrating (seriously though, Michael Bay's face is just plain lopsided and there are hardly any decent profile-type photos in existence of David Lynch's ace sound designer Alan Splett)... some didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, some looked pretty good overall. Here are just a few of the ones that are possibly most easily recognised.

(Give up? They're all directors. From the top: Stephen Spielberg, Hayao Miyazaki, Ken Loach, Ridley Scott, Edgar Wright and Sam Raimi. Yes, I know - I promise there were some women as well, but I didn't trust you to know what Lynn Ramsey or Kelly Reichardt or Thelma Schoonmaker looked like. Sorry I didn't believe in you; I'll try harder next time.)