A collection of heedless folks succumb to painful mishaps in Ruud Bakker’s graduation animation BLACK&BLUE.

It’s not often we’ll dedicate a whole post on DN to a new piece of technology – but then again it’s not often its promotional campaign will feature commissioned work from the likes of Don Hertzfeldt, David OReilly and Patrick Doyon. Released in early June 2013 by the National Film Board of Canada, the McLaren’s Workshop app is an iPad download intended to inspire and educate animators by introducing them to the work of legendary animator Norman McLaren and the tools/techniques he used creating his films.

For those unfamiliar with the great man (we forgive you), McLaren was a Scottish born filmmaker who went on to found the NFB’s Animation Studio and pioneer an entirely new conception of animation that won him tons of awards, including an Oscar® (Neighbours) and a Palme d’Or (Blinkety Blank), and a dedicated core of fans and disciples that thrives to this day. (McLaren died on 27 January 1987.) – http://blog.nfb.ca/

The McLaren app is completely free and lets users create their own films using techniques championed by the award-winning animator, as well as providing access to the his back catalogue (51 films) and eleven documentaries about the filmmaker’s production methods. We spoke to filmmakers David OReilly and Patrick Doyon about the short films they created to promote the app and just how useful the app is itself as an animation tool:

And here’s the making of video:

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Alex Grigg, Eamonn O’Neill, Impactist, CRCR, Rubber House and Awesome Inc. were each given 10 seconds of music provided by Impactist, four colours and a free run at Cartoon Network’s role call of characters to animate. These were then brought together for a mind boggling 60 seconds of hyper-animated goodness; which I may well have to watch on a loop for a week, whilst hopped up on a cocktail of Sherbet Dips and Cherryade.

We’ve been following the work of Andrew ‘GRIFF’ Griffin for some time now – ever since we were initially bowled over by the emotional power of his striking multi-track music promo for The Cinematic Orchestra, and were once again moved close to tears with his follow-up short The Gift – a melancholic reimagining of the legend of the stork.

In a complete change of direction the filmmaker’s latest short Wish List, a collaboration with UK-based illustrator Scott Garrett, is a light-hearted, humorous animation detailing the wishes of a random collection of misfits. Due to air as part of Channel 4′s Random Acts tonight (Monday 3rd June 2013) at 11:05pm, Griff spoke to DN a couple days ago to let us know all about the project and how it was working on something so different to The Gift and To Build a Home:

“Firstly I’d pick one of Scott’s many characters, and scripted around his one word gags to see if I could flesh them out a bit, then I started with the voice, recording Steve/myself reading the script, choosing the best take and then playing with the speed/pitch etc. to make each one distinctive. Then I’d go straight into animated lip sync. Once the lip sync was done I’d pop that mouth on the face and animate the eyes, then put the face on a head and animate that and so on a so forth until the whole body was animated. This wouldn’t work for everything, but was well suited for this job for a few reasons:

The downside was that a couple of them didn’t work and were ditched as it would be too labour intensive to save or start again, but overall it was a lovely method to use, and a bit like using actors in that it felt far more spontaneous.”

Diving into a coma, a female body experiences extreme inner tension. Its mutating silhouette gradually invades an empty space to a point of complete saturation.

The first time I ever saw the work of Kristian Andrews, I was struck by how his short films Rabbit Punch and Bald Dad made me instantly drift away to my own childhood memories. His autobiographical films, created whilst studying at the Royal College of Art, feel like the embodiment of British childhood for someone of my generation – when as kids we spent as much time outside as possible. We were determined to delve into the animator’s headspace by inviting Andrews to become the latest filmmaker featured in DN’s TheyAreAnimators series.

“A big box of my Dad’s old matchbox cars consumed my imagination as a 4 year old. The gift of a remote control red Ferrari from my grandparents was a source of inspiration, that quickly turned to frustration when I realized its fatal design flaw; it couldn’t reverse. Around the time I had to choose my GCSE options my Dad took me to the RCA show to see their famous vehicle design course. After looking at the cars I accidentally watched Richard Kenworthy’s The Littlest Robo (1999) and all my thoughts of contributing to the planet’s environmental demise melted.

Like ‘Car designer’ the term ‘Animator’ isn’t one that really fits what I do. ‘Animator’ is a word that implies ‘technician’ rather than ‘artist’. People talk about ‘The craft of animation’, but it doesn’t pay to be too precious about a discipline that’s constantly redefining itself with interpolated keyframing replacing frame by frame animation and then performance capture replacing interpolated keyframing… In my next film I’m going to utilise performance capture and not much ‘animation’ because when you’re not an animator, you’re free to use whatever technique suits.”

“When I was making my graduation films, I didn’t want them to have the RCA stamp of quality but instead I wanted them to have the RCA stamp of scratchy-wobbliness like Jonathan Hodgeson’s Nightclub (1983). At the time there seemed to be so many slickly produced, well rendered student films that I wanted to do something a bit cruder and dirtier like JJ Villard’s Son of Satan (2003).

Looking back, college was an important time of experimentation but I suppose in the back of my mind was that voice asking: ‘What kind of filmmaker are you going to be for the rest of your life!?’. I don’t ever want to know the answer to this question, I just hope that each of my films has their own voice.”
 

“I draw a lot from life and when you regularly engage in a practice like that you find ways of simplifying shapes and ways of recording things quickly that come back to you when you need them. Necessity encourages you to develop short-cuts and idiosyncrasies to help you record just the essential information. Drawing is a bit like a language in this way. When it came to making my college films I tried to use that approach. I laid out shots simply, so they overlapped and used ‘negative space’ in the same way as I did in my sketchbook. There are stylistic choices that are specific to each film as well, in Bald Dad it was important that I restrict myself to a very specific type of felt tip and in my new film, I am limiting my polygon count and bit depth.”

“Inspired by GIF, this video clip is about the clichés of American antagonisms: Christian thought, homeland love and excesses of the USA.”

Directed, animated and edited by Los Angeles filmmkaer Sean Buckelew, Another is an epic and ambitious 17-minute animation that tackles themes of death, bereavement and parental responsibility.

A family’s idyllic life is interrupted when the father is killed while defending the family from an intruding bear. Asserting victory, the bear moves into the house and assumes the role of father for himself. Once his foot is in the door, however, he finds himself implicated in a family dynamic he did not expect.

Another may be set in an unrecognisable comic world, where a bear can become a paternal figure to a young boy, but the central topics of this animation are one’s we can all recognise. By creating something absurd, that has its roots firmly planted in reality, Buckelew has created a powerful and poignant short destined to make you explore your own parental relationships. So just where did this unusual narrative of a grizzly father came from:

“There’s definitely some real life inspiration for the plot, but not quite what everyone assumes. I was visiting New York for my brother and (now) sister-in-law’s wedding, and we were very self-consciously trying to come up with an idea for a new film and sort of responding to the emotional vibes in the air surrounding their imminent betrothal. The original idea was about this father/husband character having a strange sense of responsibility with his family (like, he would get a paycheck and blow all of his money on bad, amateur art just to give a sense of purpose to the bad artists making it) and getting in trouble and just generally having a tense relationship with certain kinds of responsibilities. I think we also wanted to try to have lots of tension and fuck ups without demonizing any of the characters. My brother did this little sketch of a mom and kid watching out the window as a dad was mauled by a bear (for some reason), and the two ideas sort of fused in a way we liked. We spent the next few weeks exploring some of the possibilities of a bear having uneasy familial responsibilities, and the movie just sort of filled itself out. All of the more abuse moments are purely imaginative though, not drawn from any personal experience (shout out to my actual Dad, who is about the coolest, most supportive dude on the planet).”

Accompanying the ominous themes of Another, Buckelew opted for a cartoonish aesthetic, providing a contrasting visual style for his dark narrative. It’s a strong look, made even stronger by its connected storyline, but how did the director go about achieving the film’s style?

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Eoin was kind enough to talk DN through his working process on the short:

Encounter has racked up a respectable 17K Vimeo views over the past fortnight, although I reckon at least 900 of those have come from the film’s unexpected number one fan:

ChildLine is a UK-based, confidential, free, 24-hour counseling service for children and young people under the age of 19. ChildLine deals with any issue that causes distress or concern, one of which is unfortunately sexual abuse. For this project, we were approached by YCN Studio in London to craft an animated piece that would help children who are considering contacting ChildLine feel comfortable about the process of speaking with a counselor about sexual abuse.

“The development happened when I tried to interpret what the female vocalist in the song meant when she sang “treat me right”, combined with my fondness towards other videos like the Justice DVNO video, and of course, the opening sounds in the music track evoked images of space. All of that combined resulted in the idea of romance novels covers and how mysteriously ridiculous they are.”

With the concept nailed, Ohji sourced a wide selection of pulpy romance covers from the internet as well as taking a trip to the thrift store, armed with a scanner and his laptop. Once all the images were digitised, the majority of work took place in a combination of Photoshop and After Effects – Final Cut Pro putting in a brief appearance to create rough outlines and map timing.

“It all took about an entire month of intense sitting in front of a computer. Part way through when I knew wasn’t going to make the deadline on my own, I enlisted the help of my roommate, Jeremy, who is an animation graduate, to help me with some Photoshop work.”

“It took us over a year since the first pitch in August 2012, whenIi just sent some illustrations, until Jan 2013 that we got the GO to start producing this spot.

Over all this time, we got a lot of ups and downs and literally the project got into the drawer several times. I did a lot of drawings, we developed a lot of ideas, we traveled, we met, we drank, we talked, we sent mails, we did storyboards, we change shots, but always in the best of moods and we are actually sorry that it came to an end, because we wanted to keep on this wave of frames and drawings.”

Ben Barrett-Forrest educates and entertains in his impressive paper-letter animation The History of Typography.

“The video was made by combining live action footage with cut paper animation shot on green screen (green paper really!). Kevin Peroni of Wiretree and I got together for coffee one day and talked ideas. He suggested that I make the main character based on me, so I took the opportunity to create a little tale centered around me and my fiancee Alicia!

Production began with a collection of interesting sticks and rocks, which I took back to my studio and painted. I wanted the environments to include a hint of color, and also imply a tribal culture was at work in the area. I shot the footage in various places around Austin Texas, as well as a few state parks I visited over the past couple of months. I had worked on a video of this type before, with my music video for The Boxing Lesson’s song Better Daze. This video, however, allowed me to try out the incorporation of cut paper and live action with a wider color palette. I’m happy with how it turned out.”

Check out these behind the scenes stills from the film:

Not content with making some of the most innovative animation seen in recent years, eccentric creative-type David OReilly seems to have so many fingers in so many pies, he’s going to need to some more fingers very soon (something I wouldn’t put past him). The world’s first twitter based comic, a ‘lifestyle brand’ for teens, a creative commons 3d model of Walt Disney’s head, a time-wasting game, you name it, OReilly’s probably done it. Following on from our focus on his Adventure Time episode A Glitch is a Glitch last month, we decided it was about time we found out a little more about his work so far:

In a great act of sharing and community, David has recently released all 65 character rigs from The External World as a free download. But what are his hopes for what will happen to his creations?

“The characters were sitting on my hard drive and I realized that because I owned them I could release them. Learning 3d is intimidating to most people because of things like rigging – so I hope this helps out those who would otherwise give up too soon.”

Formed whilst studying on the animation/illustration programme at San José State University, the six student members of Bronto House Animation studio decided they couldn’t wait for their studies to finish before becoming a part of the world of animated short films. Deciding that it would be a “lot of fun and a great learning experience to make a short animated film over summer vacation and the fall semester”, the collective finished their first animation The Pod back in 2011. It’s an epic science fiction tale of a marooned spaceman who finds himself in a battle to return his ship, after crash landing on a foreign planet. So how did a bunch of students come up with such an ambitious story?

“Being that our team is comprised of 6 college students, we felt that this was a dilemma we often run into. Do I sacrifice time I could be spending with a loved one to finish rendering a painting? Should I go buy some groceries or just continue drawing these story board panels? Should I sacrifice sleep to spend time massaging curves in Maya’s graph editor? We wanted to comment on how focus and determination towards a career often leaves us neglecting something or another.”

“That mixed with us all being sci-fi nerds left us with the story of The Pod.”

The sprawling narrative isn’t the only impressive thing about Bronto House’s first production though, with the visual elements of The Pod easily matching the grand spirit of the film’s plot. The team explain the production process behind their 9-minute animation:

“Our major hurdle was that we were a very small team with a tight deadline. So we developed a pipeline that involved Adobe Flash, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Premier alongside some nifty GarageBand and Audacity tricks. We used hand-animation principles in Flash and maintained an aesthetic that would be easy to work with while still looking “cool”. Even though we had a grasp of how we wanted to make the film, we still had no actual experience doing it. So the film-making process was definitely a learn-as-you-go type deal which involved a lot of creative problem solving.”

“The film was completed in several phases that often overlapped each other. During the beginning of our 2011 summer vacation we cut an animatic we were happy with; designed all assets of our film; developed style guides; settled on final color treatment; researched and tested our pipeline; organised our production schedule; and started initial animation.”

“When we started school back up in the Fall we finished rough animation and backgrounds. We then switched to cleaning up animation and collecting sound effects simultaneously. Finally we composited the animated shots with BGs, edited the shots together, added sound fx and created music.”

“We had a lot of fun with the sound effects and music. One of our animators, Nick Carpenter, actually ran along side a train with his MacBook Pro and a mic to get some of the major sound effects we used for the actual pod space ship in the film. Another one of our team members, Michael Harding, got his band (Drop Dead Sixty) involved who created all of the music featured in the film.”

“The Film was completed just before our winter break in Mid-December 2011. We were able to debut the finished film during an end-of-the-semester screening On SJSU’s campus.”

“We then went into sending our film out to various film festivals – The Pod has been in 15 film festivals/film competitions world-wide.”

“One day after we finished The Pod and premiered it, we set out to work on a music video for Drop Dead Sixty’s song, Mediatic. We finished the music video in 4 months!”

“We are all busy finishing up our last semester at SJSU and on the hunt for jobs in the animation industry. We have a few plans for post-college projects that definitely include short animated films.”