Conor lives at home with his Gran on Anfield Road, Liverpool. Life is routine — Findus Crispy Pancakes for tea, drunk scallies on the way to the footy, and a school that’s more like a prison.
But Conor dreams of getting out, going to art college in London with his girlfriend Maureen… but he’s terrified of leaving his sick domineering grandmother behind and striking out on his own.
What follows is a Northern Fantasy, as Conor navigates bigotry, sickness, and being true to himself, all against the glorious backdrop of 1980s Liverpool.

Ahead of the next leg of his book tour, which begins this Thursday (Sep 25) as part of the Encounters Film Festival, Skwigly caught up with Chris to learn more about Anfield Road‘s origins, development and ties to his earlier work in film and animation.

You’ve made many films over the years and you’re known for your eclectic work that spans live-action, animation and hybrid work that is deeply funny, whilst also often being quite dark. Having had the idea as a script for a number of years, I understand you worked on the novelised version of the story for four years. What prompted the change in medium?

I had initially tried to make the project as a film. I wrote a feature-length script and pitched it, but I could never secure the funding. Then lockdown came, and I found myself with much more time to draw. Feeling determined, I decided to tackle the entire project through drawing.
Initially, I was apprehensive about working alone because I enjoy collaborating with others. However, once I started drawing, I discovered that I truly enjoyed the process. Although I had spent time drawing before, this time I could see my skills improving, which was incredibly exciting.
At the end of the day, a story is a story, and it doesn’t matter how you tell it. You just have to get it out there. Whether it’s a painting, an installation, a film, or a musical, what matters is that you communicate something to the audience.
When I started in animation by making a film called “Safari”. I only animated because I didn’t know any actors and didn’t have a camera, so I made my characters out of plasticine. For me, the story always comes first; the medium is secondary.

You’re not a football fan yourself, but the film is set against an important event both in Liverpool’s and football history – why did you feel this was important to document and what do you feel it reflects in Conor’s own journey?

I always felt like an outsider growing up. I didn’t watch EastEnders, Coronation Street, or go to the football matches like everyone else I went to school, with. I guess I was the arty Scouser who liked to draw pictures and play music. I thought it would be interesting to create a character who felt like an outsider as well. Someone who, upon seeing everyone else heading to the football ground, wanted to go somewhere else.
As the story progresses, Connor develops an appreciation for football, but it’s something he has to experience firsthand. Football is very much a part of Liverpool. In fact, you can’t really have a story about Liverpool without mentioning football. The game’s influence on the city and its people is unmistakable.

The book shows a development in your own art style and has an energy and immediacy akin to Reportage Illustration, how did you develop this when representing a Liverpool of the past?

I think the more you do something, the better you get at it. That was certainly the case with my drawing. I drew and drew, and my drawings just became stronger. As an animator, I felt like I didn’t really have a style. I always saw myself as an animator-actor who uses his animation skills to create different stories and characters. For years, I never saw myself as having a distinct style. One minute I’d be doing children’s commercials, like those hedgehog road safety ads, and the next minute I’d be directing something truly dark like “Dad’s Dead.” The audiences for both projects didn’t really know about the existence of my artistic counterparts, which is probably just as well.
Back in 1998, I visited Paris and came across the work of Jacques Tardi. His cartoon books were truly a revelation to me. They were quite realistic in style, but at the same time impressionistic. I was particularly taken with his Nestor Burma books—they’re just beautiful. When I saw them in a bookshop in Paris, I thought, “If I could draw in any style, I’d like to draw like Tardi.”
In 1998, I made a postcard that was my own take on Tardi’s style, which showed Santa Claus arriving at Liverpool Lime Street on a train. This was something I always wanted to do, but instead, I explored many different styles, such as hybrid animation and live-action 2D, and never went back to that cartoon style until I started working on “Anfield Road.” Another key reference for my was my 1997 film “The Broken Jaw” in which I used different colour palettes for each story section. This is something I brought back for “Anfield Road”.

Anfield Road (Chris Shepherd/Titan Publishing)

The book has being doing really well and is already in its second edition. You’ve been very proactive in getting it out there. How have you found the response and do you have any highlight from its journey so far from events or people who have read/commented on the book?

It has been an amazing experience to publish the book. I never imagined I would ever do this. When I got the book out there, I saw it as my one chance to get people to look at it. I felt like I was back in that position of not knowing what I was doing, similar to when I first started working in animation. The first film I ever made, “Safari,” back in the 80s, was created with little knowledge. I ended up cutting it down from an amazing 12 minutes of animation to just two because I didn’t know any better.
With “Anfield Road,” it was the same thing. I didn’t know what I was doing and just launched into creating a 272-page graphic novel. I had no idea how much time it would take to draw. The same went for publicity—I had never done a graphic novel before, so I approached lots of people to see if they wanted to cover it or if it might interest them. The team at Titan really helped me out, and ultimately, it was a lot of fun to get the book out there.
I’ve had some great interactions with people from Liverpool about the book, which is really emotional for me since it’s my hometown. Many people have come to me with pictures of their houses, showing me where they lived on Anfield Road and sharing stories about their lives. It’s really exciting. One person even showed me a picture of a dolls house that their grandfather had made, which was based on a house on Anfield Road. I looked it up on Google Earth, and the dollhouse was incredibly accurate. That was truly amazing.
It’s incredible when a piece of art you create can have an impact on the real world. That is what creative expression is all about.

You’ve also been running the highly successful Bar Shorts with creative partner Dave Anderson (Dog & Rabbit) at London’s Garden Cinema for a number of years, through which you hosted a screening of Willy Russell’s 1977 Our Day Out with Alexei Sayle, who has been a great advocate for the book. Can you tell me bit more about the screenings and yours and Dave’s plans for Bar Shorts moving forward?

When I was writing the book, Titan – the publishers – asked me to get some endorsements. I thought about asking Alexei, as he is a comedy hero and grew up in Anfield. During my time working in TV, I seldom met anyone from my background. Film and TV tend to be populated by non-working-class people. The only people I could think of from Anfield in the business were Alexei and Alison Steadman. I had never met Alexei, so I got in touch with him, sent him the manuscript, and he endorsed it. Later on, he even wrote a foreword for the book! He has been very generous to me and the project.
The foreword sets the scene really well, describing how beautiful Anfield is. That was something I wanted to convey with the book—the idea that there is beauty in the everyday life of 1980s Liverpool. When we launched the book, we thought it would be a great idea to show one of the big inspirations, which is Willy Russell’s Our Day Out. The story of Our Day Out focuses on a group of Liverpool schoolchildren going on a trip to a zoo in Wales. I remember seeing it for the first time in school when it came out in 1978. Older kids were talking about it and were amazed by it. It was the first time we saw our world on screen, and seeing where you grow up portrayed in that way is a very powerful thing.
That idea has always stayed with me throughout all my films and books. We were honoured to have Willy Russell’s wife, Annie, come along to the screening, and Alexi was there too. We spoke about many things, including how Liverpool has changed over time. It was interesting that Alexi left home ten years before me, so how we saw the city was slightly different. It was brilliant to acknowledge and celebrate this city.
The biggest thing for me was when Rachel Cooke wrote a positive article in The Guardian about the book, calling it From Liverpool With Love. It meant a lot when it became the Graphic Novel of the Month, as it felt like I had come home to the city with the book. It was like the circle of life had joined up.
Regarding Bar Shorts, I’ve been involved with Dog & Rabbit’s Dave Anderson on this project for 15 years, on and off. Dave is such a good friend, and we see life in very similar ways. Our collaboration with the Garden Cinema has been truly inspirational. Bar Shorts has given us the chance to interview various creative people and showcase their favourite works. We love it when people from different backgrounds participate, whether they are composers, directors, comedians—you name it.
In the past, we’ve had some amazing guests, including Alexei Sayle, Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson, Robert Bradbrook, Jonathan Hodgson, and Jesse Davies. Jesse shared his father’s [Carl Davis] compositions for Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual films. The magic of Bar Shorts lies in the fact that each screening is very different from the last. We have more screenings coming up in the next few months and some exciting announcements to make about Bar Shorts.

Anfield Road (Chris Shepherd/Titan Publishing)

With the popularity of the book and your history of creating outstanding films, do you think an adaption could be on the horizon?

Yes there could be a film of Anfield Road, for sure. But I’m not really thinking about that at the minute; I’m currently plotting out a sequel to the book.

And do you think we’ll see more of Conor’s journey, or will you leave us hoping for the best for him and his future?

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about what happens next to Conor in the story, as well as all the other characters including Maureen and Danny. I don’t want to give away too much if you haven’t read the book yet. The sequel is set in London, in the 1990s.
What I did with Anfield Road was capture many parts of Liverpool that no longer exist, as they have been demolished. I want to do the same for London. I want to recreate 90s London, particularly focusing on places that have long gone or been forgotten. It’s funny, I’ve actually lived in London longer than I ever lived in Liverpool, so it’s time for me to explore the capital.
London is so big and changes so rapidly that you can hardly remember what used to be there. Parts of London have just disappeared. So it would be fun to recreate some of these. I have a few ideas in mind, such as incorporating settings like the Black Cap in Camden or the wonderful Piccadilly Café on Denman Street. These were really pivotal places for many of us.
So, there’s a lot to look forward to in the future.

Chris Shepherd will present Anfield Road at the Encounters Film Festival this week (Sep 25, 2:30pm Arnolfini). See below or visit https://anfieldroadstory.com/blog for a full list of upcoming tour dates.

The post Anfield Road | Q&A with Chris Shepherd appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Following a premiere at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and a festival run including screenings at Clermont-Ferrand and Ottawa International Animation Festival with major award wins at Anima Brussels, Cardiff Animation Festival and SXSW among others, Nina Gantz‘s incredible stop-motion short Wander to Wonder has gone from strength to strength and is presently nominated for both an Oscar® and BAFTA.

Produced by Circe Films, Kaap Holland Film, Beast Animation, Les Productions de Milou, Blink Industries, Pictanovo, Netherlands and distributed by MIYU (whose short film roster includes fellow Oscar®-nominees Beautiful Men and Yuck!), Wander to Wonder brings us into a fantastical yet curiously nostalgic world where miniature performers Mary, Billybud and Fumbleton are left rudderless on the set of a children’s television show whose creator has passed away. As the futility of their existence becomes all the more apparent, building to an inevitably bleak conclusion, Mary remains determined that the show must go on.

The film marks Nina’s first short film since her acclaimed NFTS student film Edmond and brilliantly combines live-action and stop-motion to create a bizarre yet authentic piece that interweaves 80s culture with elements of comedy, folk and analogue horror. Ahead of this year’s BAFTA ceremony which takes place on February 16th, Skwigly were thrilled to catch up with the director and dive deep into the film’s backstory and production.

The film seems to show a darker side to nostalgia and explores feelings of grief. Where did the original idea for the film come from?

Since discovering the work of Ray Harryhausen in films such as Jason and the Argonauts and Attack of the Puppet People, I’ve had a fascination with combining live-action and stop-motion. I started thinking about what kind of world I could create if I combined these two mediums together, then after graduating from the National Film and Television School, I came up with the idea for a short film about a kids TV show with Simon Cartwright. We got very interested in where the story would go if we went behind the scenes and treated it like a family drama, with actual little humans inside the puppets. Uncle Gilly, the presenter, played a much bigger role in early versions of the script.

During seven years of development, trying to get the money together and COVID happening, Simon went on to another project. This gave me the opportunity to reflect on it and I gravitated to a much more personal version of the story. I also got the Dutch screen writer Daan Bakker involved, because I had already been working with the story for so long in my head that I needed someone to shake it up a little bit. I also got way more interested in the world of the little people in the studio and how they would survive on their own in a space like th at. During the time of the last rewrite, me and my husband also were taking care of someone who needed palliative care and when he passed away I saw how differently everyone deals with loss. And this is something that found its way into the three characters in Wander To Wonder. Mary clings on to the past and tries to keep the legacy going. Fumbleton feels kind of freed. He finally can show off his skills as a serious Shakespearean actor, while Billybud buries his head in the sand and focuses on what he knows best, which is juggling.

So this puzzle of development took 8 years but that did mean the story grew with me. I kept changing it to make it fit with my own journey as a filmmaker. And although 8 years was really too long, it did make the story rich and gave the characters depth. I guess that’s the bonus of working on something for so long!

Your films often play with a paradoxical feeling of whimsy and darkness, which, to me, always feels completely in keeping with the medium of stop-motion. As simultaneously cute, but also creepy. Where do you feel this desire to play with these two things, in this medium, comes from?

You can’t tell a heavy story like this without a little lightness. I think it also helps to hit the viewer even harder – or rather, it will hit them in an unexpected way, which is always interesting. And that’s also what I find interesting when I watch films. The two combined work best to convey the message.

This is your first independent film since Edmond, and as we’ve discussed above this took a long time to be made and from my understanding, it had quite a complex funding situation. Can you tell us a little bit more about the journey you went on to get the film made? 

Edmond was my graduation film and I now realize how much easier it is to make a film in film school because you have your crew available for advice and they’re your friends and they’re there for you all year. It doesn’t really happen like that outside of film school. You first need to find a good team and then you need to put your trust in them, which can be a bit daunting. For Wander to Wonder we had to work in a co-production between four countries, which is really insane for a short animated film. I learnt that a lot more people want to say something about the film and you also have to work with people in all four countries.

I made the animatic in the UK, where I live and I made the puppets in the Netherlands. We had to film in a certain part of Belgium, with people from that region and the post-production had to be in the South of France, which is where the money came from.

Altogether it had its pros and cons. The communication was a challenge, however, I got to know loads of amazing people in other countries that love making stop-motion films.

Was the production quite tight then, after the lengthy pre-production stage?

Yes! it took about a year in total to make. That included making the puppets, constructing the sets and then five months of filming on two sets with three months in post-production.

The performance in the puppets is so nuanced. Could you talk a little about how you achieved this as a director?

Fortunately we were able to film the voice recording session with Toby Jones and Amanda Lawrence so we had a lot of wonderful reference footage. In addition to this, I made a lot of detailed videos of myself and my DOP (or my husband!) acting stuff out to give to the animators a reference for expression and body movement. I love giving reference footage because it makes it really clear how I see the shot as a director and it helps with timing. I had a number of animators working on the film who each worked in different ways. Most of them used the reference footage and then added personality to it whereas some work from experience and intuition, which can also result in beautiful performances.

Image courtesy of Nina Gantz

I was lucky enough to see the puppets in real life, and they’re really beautiful. Can you talk a little bit about the choices you made when it came to the look of the puppets and the overall film?

The size of the sets really informed the size of the puppets.  The character design had to fit with the Uncle Gilly character (live action) and I wanted to work with real props and life-size sets, which meant we had to make them much smaller than normal stop-motion puppets. Also, because there is dialogue in the film and we needed quite a lot of expression in their faces, the most suitable option was to work with replaceable 3D-printed faces.

I had never worked with 3D printing before, and I had to find a look that I was happy with, which resulted in a very long research period. It was quite interesting because I knew they had to be fairly realistic, but then I also wanted it to clearly feel like stop-motion. A tricky balance to get right! I decided to sculpt them by hand first with some help from AMC FOK  (my art teacher since I was 5) and Eve Shepherd, who is an amazing figurative sculptor. She did a few tweaks to make them a little bit less caricatured. I sculpted the puppets twice as big as the final puppets to get all the detail I needed. These sculpts were then 3D scanned and scaled down in the computer, then we started the modeling process of the facial animation. We created a library of facial expressions, for this we got the help of BlinkInk, as I had no previous experience with 3d modeling programs. They put a whole team of really brilliant people on it that helped me to make them. Then finding the right printer for the little facial replacements was an issue. I talked to Erik Van Schaaik (The Smile, Under the Apple Tree) as he worked with the same puppet maker as I did (Pedri Animation , and he used a certain kind of printer, but because my characters were so much smaller, the surface of the faces looked very textured and powdery and the gray material of the print would shine through. It also didn’t have the translucency that real skin has. Luckily, we found another printer in Belgium that just printed factory parts and asked them to print the faces. They had never done anything like this before, so that was a challenge, but they were brilliant and super keen to make it work.

As everything on set was life-sized, we were able to source all the props from secondhand shops which was amazing, however, it also meant that our sets were huge. We had to put the whole structure on animation tables, so our animators could reach the puppets, which made it 4 meters tall.

The set was divided into 3 parts so we could have two animators, animating simultaneously, to save time. We shot around 4 seconds a day per animator so that sped the process up a bit.

Was the pigeon a taxidermied real pigeon?

Rosie Tonkin, our wonderful set designer, bought the pigeon online. You can buy real taxidermy pigeons, although it had to have a certificate stating it died of natural causes. She hollowed it out in order to put a wire rig in it. She also re-made the feet because they had to be able to move. She did an incredible job but it was strange to work with! We had considered loads of different ways of making it (including using a live pigeon), however, this is where we ended up. True Jan Švankmajer style!

Did you also say previously that Rosie also made the flies? 

She made tiny little flies, a few different versions, they were all animatable as well. So we actually animated them on greenscreen and we did little turnarounds with them, so we could place them in any shot that we wanted. We also chose to animate the water and the fire. I think these sorts of details help create a believable world where everything feels like it belongs together, so as a viewer you don’t question it. It’s quite a tricky thing to get right.

Image courtesy of Nina Gantz

So was the intention with the characters for them to read as small, human-like creatures, rather than puppets?

As I mentioned before, I really wanted them to fit with the (live-action) Uncle Gilly character, but I also wanted them to feel like stop-motion puppets, which is why I didn’t use too many facial replacements. The animators did such an incredible job because we really didn’t have a full library of faces, we just had what we needed. At the end of the film, you see some subtle print lines on the close up of Mary. I really don’t mind that, because at that point in the film you are in the story, hopefully, and you believe it. I wanted the audience to forget about how the puppets were made so I didn’t want the technique to override the story. That was important to me. They actually turned out differently to how I expected them to be, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

I think when your not familiar with the technique, I feel it’s important to stay malleable so you can adapt along the way.

I understand the film was filmed chronologically due to the spectacular ending. Can you tell us more about some of the practical solutions that had to be developed to capture those final shots?

I don’t want to give too much away, but at some point we had to destroy everything, including the costumes, the puppets and the sets – and we had to do that for real so there was absolutely no way back. It was a really frightening thing to do. We had to make some things look burnt and we did that by literally burning them. Obviously, we took them out of the studio and burned them outside but it meant that the whole studio smelt like a barbecue for two weeks!

One night I woke up at three o’clock in the morning with this immense anxiety that I hadn’t checked that everything had stopped smoldering. I know about smoldering, because my house pretty much burnt down when I was a kid – it’s really scary. You can see a block of wood that looks fine from the outside, but inside it’s still alight. I could see my name in the newspapers already, “DUTCH ANIMATOR SETS BELGIUM STUDIO ON FIRE” ! I knew I had to go back to the studio so I got a cab in the middle of the night because it was quite far away. Luckily, when I arrived I saw that the place hadn’t burned down. But I still had to go in and touch everything to double check. We had been using water to extinguish it, but you just never know.

Also, in order to feel the passage of time, we had to age the puppets and their costumes and make Fumbleton’s beard and Mary’s hair longer. They started off pristine, but at some point, the costumes had to be cut and broken to show more of their bodies, bit by bit. This meant that they had to be taken back to the puppet maker quite regularly which was a challenge because he was in the Netherlands. We had to coordinate carefully so that he had his team in place ready to work. We had four different stages of destruction: intact, dirty, broken and then burnt, so it was important that we didn’t destroy something that we would need later on.

Image courtesy of Nina Gantz

So the voice talent in the film was very integral to the film, as the characters very much drive our understanding of the world and the plot of the film and as you mentioned earlier, dialogue was something you were really keen on exploring in this film. How did you decide upon the casting?

Mary is quite a sensitive person. She is trying to cling on to the past and has a nervousness about her, but I also didn’t want to make her too fragile because she is the one making things happen and driving the others to keep going with the show. I listened to a lot of voices from casting agencies and I loved Amanda Lawrence because she is very characteristic and was actually the first one I contacted, so I was very happy that she said yes.

For Fumbleton, who for most of the time is quoting Shakespeare, I really wanted someone that came from a theatre background and understood Shakespeare but could also understand the humorous tone of the film. I already had Toby Jones in my head when I sculpted the puppets because I think he looks really amazing and I felt he would be perfect for it as he also comes from a theatre background. It was a dream to have him in the film. When I contacted him, I didn’t expect him to say yes to it but he did, which was really wonderful and he nailed it in the voice recording. It was really fun seeing Toby and  Amanda performing together.

Uncle Gilly was the really difficult one to find. I wanted him to be a kind and gentle sort of man, like Matthew Corbett, the original presenter of Sooty and Sweep. A man that acts a bit silly but is also an educator and father figure in some ways. I had been struggling to find anyone and it was two weeks before the shoot. I was taking the sets over to Belgium in a van with Rosie Tonkin (our production designer) and I said I didn’t have an Uncle Billy character yet. I asked if she knew anyone, and she actually said ‘oh, yeah, the dad of an old school friend of mine is an actor and fits your character description really well’.  It turned out to be Neil Salvage and he was the perfect fit. Two weeks later, he was in Belgium! He was such a lovely guy to work with and he really understood the references.

How have you found the response so far? And what are your hopes for the film going forward?

It’s really nerve wracking the first time you release it into the world, because you’re so close to it, so the fact that people come up to me and tell me that they are moved and that they really understand the idea behind it, is wonderful.

The success the film has had has been crazy especially now with the Annie Award and the Oscar Nomination!

The awards and festival selections just make you feel that people want to see your work, and that keeps you going, which is very nice.

Do you have any future plans for the film?

I do see a longer film in it. I didn’t make it as a proof of concept, but I think in those eight years of production I’ve done so much work on the character development and all the different versions I had of this film that it makes me feel like there is definitely more to get out of it. I’m not saying it will look exactly the same, but the world of it still intrigues me. I didn’t have that with Edmond, for instance; that was a nice story from beginning to end and it felt finished, but with this one I feel there are possibilities.

And for yourself?

When I was making this film, it was so intense that I called some of my friends and said ‘if I ever have an idea for a short film again, tell me not to do it’ ! although, like giving birth, you quickly forget about the pain! I am currently working on a family feature film, together with a writer and production company in the Netherlands, which is going to be a stop-motion homage to the pigeons of Amsterdam made from garbage and recycled stuff, which is really exciting. Alongside that, I’m developing another feature film together with the producers from WtW and will be more for adults and will use a mix of live action and stop-motion like in Wander to Wonder.

The 2025 EE BAFTA Film Awards will take place on Sunday, February 16th. For more on the work of Nina Gantz visit ninagantz.com

The post Wander to Wonder | Interview with BAFTA-winner Nina Gantz appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Book Cover The Café at the Edge of the Woods [Image: HarperCollins]

Page from The Café at the Edge of the Woods [Image: HarperCollins]

Page from The Café at the Edge of the Woods [Image: HarperCollins]

So the the story grew out of this game that, over lockdown, me, my wife and my son would play in the park. My wife would play this pretentious chef who only wanted to serve caviar and frangipanes, and my son would be the downtrodden waiter, like Manuel from Fawlty Towers, while I would play a variety of disgusting or mythical creatures – sometimes a fairy demanding a thimble of morning dew from the grass, or a witch requesting moonlight trapped inside a vase, or sometimes an ogre. It was just a really fun little game that we would play – or a fun game that they would play, and I would interrupt. But that dynamic of pomposity and grotesqueness, and someone trying to communicate between the two was really fun, and there was something really rich there. Then, over quite a long period of time, this little poem grew and grew. It got sort of ridiculously long, so then I kind of chopped it all down and just focused on one customer, who seemed the most fun, or most extreme, which was the ogre. Then I built it up again to really get Rene’s reactions and dig into who she was and why she would feel this way, and treat it more like how I’d create a scripted story. So that’s how it grew over a very, very long period of time of about three years of chewing over it, from playing the game to making a dummy copy (pictured below) which looks pretty similar and the bones of it are there. Working closely with my literary agent Luke, it was about another year or so before officially working with HarperCollins and then another year of making it. I finished it last summer, so it’s been almost a year between me actually finishing the book and it coming out. 

What drew you to want to write a children’s book? Because this isn’t your first children’s book, is it?

No, Dan [Ojari], I and Briony May Smith made the Robin, Robin picture book adaptation. But that was a different thing. It’s a lovely book, which came out of a story that Dan and I had written, but because it was tied into the film and it was something else already, there was a very different journey with it. I’ve been wanting, trying and failing to write books for probably longer than I’ve been trying to make animation. The Eagleman Stag was a book, it was like a little diary with someone’s last diary entry, that had been scribbled over by what you think is a child, but at the end you realise that it’s actually the main character after he’s had the operation. I did that as a book when I was about 20 or something, so a long time ago, and I thought that’s what I’d be going on to do. Then I realised that animation is a really fun way to translate those stories. But I’ve had lots of various stop-start projects. Dan and I were working on a graphic novel called Dead Rock for a really long time, which we still want to do, we just haven’t finished it. Things have just got in the way, which is madness, because it’s like 300 full A4 coloured pages, which is just an insane volume of work. We’ve just never fully finished it to the point where we could submit it anywhere. But for some reason, I think because of the simplicity and directness of The Café At The Edge Of The Woods, it’s just kind of cut through in a way that the others didn’t. Perhaps because there’s a really clear audience for it as well, whereas lots of my other book projects are a little more idiosyncratic. 

The book that was the basis for The Eagleman Stag [Image Mikey Please]

Maybe. I think it did come about in a very natural way. I wasn’t necessarily hunting for a children’s book idea. It was just a nice situation. But I do really love children’s books and there’s something about them that is very akin to making a short film, in that they’ve got to be really economically put together, there’s no fat on them and there’s no room for waffling. You’ve just got to go straight to the meat of the thing, you’ve got to get your idea across really quickly, like in a short film. There’s a beautiful succinctness about children’s books when they’re good.

The book is for Axel and Jessica, who are your son and wife. And they were a big influence on on the idea, what do they think of the book?

I think they like it. It’s a lovely thing because, at the moment, Axel is seven and is just the right age to appreciate it. So, I’ve gone to his school to read it to his class which has been really nice. I have wondered, what he’ll think about it when he’s, like, 17, and this depiction of him as Glumfoot. He might not appreciate it so much then! But for now, I think it’s going down well.

The style of the book is unmistakably you. But can you tell me a little bit about how the style has developed and some inspirations that have affected that over the years?

I didn’t really know how I was going to do it, to be honest. Even after I’d signed the deal with HarperCollins, I’d done this rough version, which was just pencil on paper, and then coloured digitally. But I thought, ‘Oh, well, I won’t do it like that. For the final thing, I’ll do paintings’. And I did lots of painting tests, and I did various ink things. I did half a dozen finished style explorations. Then the one I liked best was my rough one, the first sort of scrappy one that I did because it had this direct rawness to it that I loved.  It was very important for me that I had an analogue process in there, I knew that I definitely wasn’t going to do it all digitally. I wanted it to have a strong grounding in painting or collage or drawing. Drawing is my favourite thing, so I guess that is why it is in pencil.

So the roughs were all done in these sketchbooks, and by doing everything in a sketchbook it meant that I could just take it anywhere and do it. As an activity, there was something really attractive about doing that. Recently I’ve come to the opinion that I want to really enjoy the actual minutiae of making the work; I’ve done a lot of projects where I’m like, ‘It’s okay, go through the suffering of this project with the idea that I’ll really be happy at the end of it’. And that’s not a very good way to spend the hours of your life. So it was really important to actually enjoy the process of doing it. That’s why I didn’t do paintings. I would need so many paints, I’d have to set myself up, and there’d be this time stress of the paints drying. It might have looked better, but I wouldn’t have liked doing it as much. I might have gotten very precious or been afraid to make a mistake, whereas having a process that was really direct meant that I could throw it away if I didn’t like it.

There are some great testimonials for the book from Jon Klassen and Daniel Kwan, what was it like to receive these compliments from such talented colleagues?

Those were great. Jon also gave me a brilliant breakdown of the book early on, probably around the draft stage when I made the dummy version of the book. We’d been in communication a little bit about something else, and I was like, ‘Oh, and by the way, I’m doing this children’s book’. He said ‘Oh, cool send it and I’ll have a look’. And I thought he’d just say something nice, but then he sent me this huge breakdown of every page and how to sort of restructure it so it kind of works a bit better, and I followed some of his advice. It was wonderful, such a kind thing of him to do, and somewhere along the way he said that nice thing and let me put it on the back of the book, which is great. Daniel Kwan’s quote is actually from an article in a Netherlands newspaper, which was based on a bunch of talks we and some other friends did for a festival called Playground. Within that was this very lovely thing that Daniel said. I was very touched and he was very happy for me to put it on the back of this book.

Page from The Café at the Edge of the Woods [Image: HarperCollins]

Yes, I do. The sequel to the book has already been announced. It’s called The Cave Downwind of the Café. My summer this year has been spent making it, I’m still a little away from completing it, but it’s not a sequel. It’s an equal. So it runs alongside the first, kind of like a companion piece. There are a bunch of other stories involved with them, but so far this second one is confirmed with a release next year. It’s fun doing a second one because I get to correct and improve upon all the lessons I learned in the first one. There’s quite a varying degree of design in the first one, and now having done that book I understand the rules of the characters. So I hope it’ll be a bit more cohesive in this next one.

The Cafe at the Edge of the Woods is available now from all good bookstores. Mikey Please’s next book The Cave Downwind from the Cafe is due for release in 2025. 

The post The Café at the Edge of the Woods | Interview with Mikey Please appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

The almost brutalist minimalism of the design, with its heavy emphasis on block shapes, texture and lack of colour, is in one regard an efficiency measure by Conor to aid in both the storytelling and animation. However, the design also lends the film an elegance that is demonstrated throughout the film, perhaps most succinctly in the opening credits in which every word of the title is connected by a single line, symbolising both the connective tissue of the story and the titular nail. This works in tandem with the humour of the film, which allows the audience to react to its darker and grander themes. Born from a promise made by an artist to themselves to continue to explore their own work after leaving art school, The Final Nail in the Coffin demonstrates a commitment to creative development and pursuing one’s own artistic voice alongside industry work. 

Above: The opening minute of The Final Nail in the Coffin (Dir. Conor Kehelly)

Having been selected for various animation festivals including Monstra, Pictoplasma, British Shorts Berlin and our own Skwigly Screening at the 2023 Manchester Animation Festival as well as winning the Best Film Award at Singapore’s Cartoons Underground and Best Late Night Bizarre Award at London International Animation Festival, we were able to ask Conor a few questions and get a better insight into the film and the filmmaker himself. 

How did you first come to animation?

I watched the typical popular animated shows on Cartoon Network growing up, but the thing that flicked the switch in my head for wanting to actually make it was due to having unsupervised access to the internet during the flash-animation renaissance. I was obsessed with the janky but passionate work made by these outsider artists on websites like Newgrounds and albinoblacksheep. The majority never did it for money or fame. They usually just had an odd idea, a crap drawing pad and a lot of time. I was probably 6 or 7 years old so didn’t have the technical skills to learn how to “acquire” Adobe Flash until I was 14 or 15, but the Flash animation community of the 2000s was definitely the igniting spark.

The narrative follows some pretty bizarre characters that are linked through some equally unusual circumstances, was any of the film based on real events or was it totally fabricated story?

It was completely fabricated. I think the only idea that was loosely inspired by reality was one day walking to work when I first moved to London. I walked past scaffolding and heard a faint noise of someone shouting. I looked up and a cockney guy in a high vis shouted down “Oi mate. Nice socks.” I was wearing bright orange socks.

Still from The Final Nail In The Coffin (Image: Conor Kehelly)

Your film has this brilliant surreal wit, where do you feel this humour comes from?

It’s a played-out answer probably but I think being born and raised in Belfast in the North of Ireland has shaped my humour a lot. I think the troubles really damaged a lot of people during the 1960-1980s and in doing so, it damaged their humour a bit. Now their children, my generation, have absorbed that dark biting humour without as much of the traumatic baggage that comes with it. As for it being surreal, I think that is just the result of being terminally online for my whole life. With the advent of TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and the like, it is so easy to have an unoriginal thought. Every possible idea and joke has been played out, so I guess trying to find things that are still funny or thought-provoking requires us to think of ideas that go against what we think we know. Everything is hidden under so many layers of irony now that humour has become a gut instinct and it is really just hoping that the audience in some way will think like me and “get” it.

Visually you have developed a really clear identity in your work. There’s a graphical sense to your character and environmental design that feels representative of classic modernism but with a very contemporary look, where do you draw inspiration from?

My work is mainly born out of functionality and essentialism. I am one person making work in the tiny gaps of free time I can grab during the 9/5 work week. I really just got into my head that the idea is everything. The visuals are just an aid to help the idea stand up properly as best it can. I wanted to disarm the audience of prejudice before coming into the animation, so I thought if I designed the animation to look raw, sore and broken from the beginning, any small missing details and technical errors would sit in harmony with the style. The stereotype of animation is that it is for children, so to counteract that I just leaned into it with the character and set designs. Wobbly lines, building block bodies and overly expressive key poses. People think the intent of the animation is to make them laugh and hopefully, they believe that until it hits a point where they slowly realise I want to say a little bit more.

Still from The Final Nail In The Coffin (Image: Conor Kehelly)

The film was your first after graduating from Manchester School of Art, what prompted you to make a film independently?

I think the only goal I ever set myself after uni was to not make my grad film my last. I find it sad that we only really get one chance to say something with our art, before being thrown into the deep end. My grad film was not what I wanted to use as my short film career gravestone. I hope the shorts I make act as milestones in my life somehow. I have probably jinxed it now and will struggle to make anything ever again. Hopefully not though.

There’s some really strong music and sound design in the film that you also did, could you tell me about that process?

I was a classically trained double-bass player before I swerved into the animator lane. A guilty thought has always sat in the back of my brain telling me that I wasted a lot of time and money in music equipment, training and software over the years. But in starting the process of this film, I realised I could have a lot more control if I built the music alongside the film, swapping out temp tracks for my own scores. I bounced around many many genres. At one point the music was very chaotic and electronic, like synthesized jazz but as I kept building on the ending, I ended up stripping back layers and layers until it became more quietly uplifting and sweet sounding. The final result ended up being heavily inspired by the types of songs you would hear during a funeral march.

Still from The Final Nail In The Coffin (Image: Conor Kehelly)

How have you found the response to the film?

People have been very kind to my film. I think I am a very “glass half empty” type of person when it comes to my work but it is heartwarming to see people genuinely laughing and thinking about it. At least, I think they are genuine laughs. Although sometimes I am fighting imposter syndrome when my film is wedged between these big-budget grandiose shorts at film festivals, it is interesting that my film and its small humbling budget and production value seem to garner the same positive responses.

I can see from your various social media platforms that you are working on a new film, can you tell me anything about that?

I don’t know if I would call it a new short film yet. I am not sure what it is at this point. It started off as a 30-second TikTok. But I ended up adding lines and in-betweens and now it has landed somewhere in-between. I don’t want to say much about it at all yet. It may never see the light of day, but I will say that it is a lot more polarising and strange than the Final Nail In The Coffin.

Still from The Final Nail In The Coffin (Image: Conor Kehelly)

You can see more of Conor’s work and find out where his film is playing next on his website and his Instagram.

The post The Final Nail In The Coffin | Interview with Conor Kehelly appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

With his creativity shackled by his benefactors – firstly the pompous pope and then the powerful young French King Francis I – da Vinci finds an unlikely companion and kindred spirit in the King’s sister Marguerite (voiced by Daisy Ridley, Star Wars), a friend and muse to the artist and inventor in the last stages of his life. The film boasts an impressive cast, with British actor Stephen Fry as the titular Leonardo, Marion Cotillard as Louise de Savoy and Matt Berry as Pope Leo XI. 

Growing from Capobianco’s previous 2D short film Leonardo, also about da Vinci, the feature makes use of puppet stop-motion characters – reminiscent of the classic American stop-motion works of Rankin and Bass – with 2D animation to capture a body of work spanning various innovations, detailed anatomical diagrams and world-renowned paintings among his other ventures. Created in collaboration with French-based Foliascope Studios and co-directed by the talented Pierre-Luc Granjon (Anatole’s Little Saucepan), a truly passionate team was brought together to create a poignant film full of warmth that seeks to present the necessity of creativity in the pursuit of knowledge and a better world for the many, rather than the wealthy few.

Ahead of next week’s UK theatrical release, Skwigly were able to speak to Jim Capobianco about the long journey that brought the story of Leonardo from the page to the big screen. 

Leonardo da Vinci is probably one of the most famous inventors and artists in history. What was it about him, personally, that you felt connected to?

I think for me, it was because we know that he was this famous and amazing person who could do no wrong, who was interested in all these different things, a genius. I wanted to tell the other side of that story, the real human aspect of Leonardo da Vinci. Because he did question himself, and thought he failed. He did fail, sometimes with his ideas, and procrastinated and got distracted. He wrote grocery lists in his writings. You realise that this guy really existed, obviously, and was a real person. So that kind of aspect is really what I wanted to work around because, to me, that’s an interesting character that we can relate to. A character that is just a genius could be boring; not many of us are geniuses, so it’s a little hard to relate to them – and you can even hate them, in a way. So I really wanted to tell the warmer side of him and create that kind of a character.

Still from The Inventor by Jim Capobianco

You have a very impressive history in the industry, working on multiple, incredibly well-loved projects. Is this your first feature as a director, and what did you learn from taking on the role?

I’ve directed before, but nothing this long. And I did enjoy directing, I felt like I could do it well, and I thought I could just play in a world that’s a little bit longer. But I think more than anything, it was just the idea. I wanted to write the script in a longer format than other things I’ve done in my own work. Then one thing just led to another, and we made it. Someone needed to direct it, so I directed it, but I don’t know if I ever felt I had to be the one to direct. It was more due to being a filmmaker, having an idea for something that just needs to be made and seen and created. I think that was more of the impetus than just to direct.

A director born of necessity, rather than ego.

Exactly. Yeah, that’s very true.

Still from The Inventor by Jim Capobianco

This is also your first foray into stop-motion. There are obvious links between the engineering qualities of Leonardo’s work and stop-motion, but what made you select it as the primary technique in the film, and how did you find the process?

Yeah, so it’s exactly what you just said. I love stop-motion and I love drawn animation and I thought the film should be made with drawn animation for sure because of his drawings. But then I thought “Drawn animation is not as popular as it once was, with the people who hold the purse strings, and stop-motion keeps coming back, there’s always an interest in it. I’ve always loved it, I didn’t know how to do it but it felt very like Da Vinci to me as well, as you mentioned. So to me, those two forms together would be the perfect way to tell a story about Leonardo da Vinci. I figured, even though I didn’t know how stop-motion worked, I would find people who did.

It was very beneficial to have a co-director who knew stop motion, Pierre-Luc Granjon, who has made many stop-motion films, mostly short films, but also the longer form film The Four Seasons of Leone. I discovered and was inspired by his films before I knew him, from when I was looking at all the stop-motion films I could find. Then, when I started with Foliascope Studio in France, the head of the studio Ilan Urroz asked if I wanted to meet Pierre-Luc as he had worked for them and I thought that would be cool. Then he suggested that he may be a good co-director. We met and it was like two brothers who had been separated at birth! I was attracted to his sensibilities because I liked his films, and our sensibilities connected really well. He’s just such a wonderful human being that it worked out perfectly, because I got to learn from a master and I could concentrate on making sure the story was told properly. So it was a perfect combination of people.

Co-directors Pierre-Luc Granjon and Jim Capobianco on set.

Within stop-motion, there are so many different processes and different techniques. Did choosing a more Rankin and Bass aesthetic for the film come directly from the short or any of the people you worked with?

It came from me, most of all. I sent those films over to them and I think it was the first time the French team had seen them, as they’re very American. I don’t know if their films get out there much beyond America, so I think that opened their eyes a bit. I think they also hoped that I didn’t want it to look as crude. I like dot-eyed characters, I think there’s something cute about them; I designed Leonardo for the short that way, so if this film was an outgrowth from the short then he would have to look like that Leonardo as well.

I think that my design sensibility lends itself to those older Rankin and Bass-looking films. I just love the simplicity of design in them and I think that’s just what I gravitate toward. I was also inspired by Jiří Trnka, Karel Zeman, George Pal’s work and also more modern studios like Screen Novelties here in the US who do amazing work and are inspired by all those historical stop-motion people. Their work was also inspiring to me because they handle stop-motion in a way that’s a little bit more like 2D animation, using very broad caricature movement and acting, which is very hard to do in stop-motion. They’re good friends, too. So I also introduced the Europeans to their work, Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas especially.

Still from The Inventor by Jim Capobianco

Was there anyone else who greatly aided in the film’s production?

Our line producer, actually, Kat Alioshin who worked on Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, and all these very accomplished American stop-motion films. She brought her production acumen to Foliascope, which needed to be really structured and planned-out because of the budget and how ambitious the film we were making was. So she brought that way of thinking to the project. Kat and Pierre-Luc, together, really made the film run so smoothly, and we didn’t go over budget or time, because of their planning – it was perfect. She’s also really funny and fun, so she brought a lot of levity to the studio, and people just loved her. She really understands artists and I think that’s really important.

Still from The Inventor by Jim Capobianco

Getting an original animated feature off the ground is no mean feat these days. Can you tell me a little bit about the journey from the original short to the feature?

After the short, I thought maybe I could make a feature film around Leonardo. And I thought maybe these three years at the end of his life would be interesting, to take a piece of his life rather than his whole life story. Originally the story was going to be focused on Leonardo’s support of the king, a kind of a King Arthur and Merlin story, but we’ve kind of seen that before and it wasn’t going anywhere for me. Then I learned about Marguerite, the king’s sister, who was this amazing Renaissance woman, and I thought “Well, maybe Marguerite learned more from Leonardo da Vinci than the king did”, which gave me this story to tell. From that point, I wrote the script and then I met Robert Rippberger, who became my co-producer. He was a real go-getter and started to run around looking for money. We went everywhere – LA, Canada, Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium and Italy, for a while, looking for money to support the film. Over the ten years it took to finally pull everything together, we just kept banging on doors and in about 2016 we made a teaser trailer to show what it would look like, which helped serve as a showcase of what it would look like; these are the sensibilities that we’ll have, how we will integrate 2D and stop-motion, how we will deal with the dissection in the film. These were all things that we were running up against. It was a lot better to show than tell.

The trailer was made in 2016, just as I left Pixar. Then up until 2020 – so for four more years – we were still running around with it. During this time I was still developing the film, I was writing the script, storyboarding it, bringing artists in when I could, to help design and create concept boards. Because with each new element, we could add them into the presentation and say “Look at this beautiful piece of art” and wow people with the project. Eventually we connected with Ilan Urroz, who loved the project so much and wanted to make it happen. With a French production studio, we were able to pitch at Cartoon Movie, which is a forum for pitching where you can get producers, distributors and sales agents. So we pitched the film and it did well. I had to tell them all that I had French blood in me, having made Ratatouille and all the other projects I’ve done, because I was the first American to pitch there, and people were wondering why some Pixar guy was pitching at there European animation conference? So it went really well and that got us going. It was a long road.

Still from The Inventor by Jim Capobianco

I understand that the music was a slightly late addition to the film, could you tell me a little about your collaboration with Alex Mandel, bringing those musical elements into the film and how you felt that helped the characters develop in the film?

So Alex and I know each other from the short film I made Your Friend The Rat, that I brought him on to help me with. I knew he was a very versatile composer. He came on to the film very early on when I was developing the script. I would give him ideas and he’d start working on the themes for the film. He did the score for the teaser trailer we did as well. But what happened was, there’s a scene in the film where Leonardo builds his workshop, when he arrives in Clos Lucé, his home in France. I didn’t want to just see people moving in boxes of paint materials, paintings and contraptions. I thought it’d be interesting if he built the workshop around him and it assembled around him, what with it being stop-motion, you can have things just pop on and appear, which would be really fun. It also felt musical to me, it felt like a song moment, which I had mentioned to Alex. So he created a song for it which was really fun. So we had this one song, and then somebody who saw an earlier version said “How can you have one song at the end of the first act? It’s gonna come out of nowhere. You should have something in the beginning to establish that there will be songs in this film”.

One thing led to another and we started adding songs to the film. In a way it helped bring out these character moments. I don’t think of the film as a musical because it grew out differently. It’s more like the original Pinocchio film; I never think of that as a musical, but it has songs in it. I think that’s the way I look at this film, because it doesn’t follow the structure of a musical, we just thought “Let’s put a song here and they should have a song there”. We also had Marion Cotillard in the film, so we felt she should sing something, so we gave her the En garde song. So that’s how we ended up having songs in the film.

The Inventor will be released exclusively in Vue cinemas from 8^th March in the UK.

The post The Inventor | Interview with director Jim Capobianco appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

The Debutante by Elizabeth Hobbs is an experimental tour de force based on the partially biographical writing of the British-born surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Hobbs’s new film takes the uptight world of 1930s debutante society  and imbues it with an impish sense of wild freedom. Created and funded in collaboration with Animate Projects and the BFI Short Form Animation Fund, the stunning work by BAFTA-nominated animator Lizzy Hobbs is a remarkable expression of avant-garde filmmaking, that radiates the power of its radical feminist narrative. This synergy between medium and subject can be seen in a mixed-media approach that combines collage, 2D, ink, paint and rotoscoping. Aided by a core team of editor Mark Jenkins, composer Hutch Demouilpied and Abigail Addison of Animate Projects, the film has journeyed far and wide screening at over 100 festivals, picking up multiple awards in its wake and was shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination last year. 

Ahead of the 2024 British Animation Awards, in which the film is up for the Best Short Film award, we spoke to a long-time friend of Skwigly Lizzy Hobbs about her past, present and future creative intentions and what it is to presume creative freedom and independent thinking in the auteur filmmaking landscape.

Where did you study and what was your journey into animation?

I did a foundation year at Chelsea College of Art, then I went to Edinburgh College of Art to study Illustration.  After I graduated I really got into printmaking, thanks to the Edinburgh Printmaker’s Workshop, and printed small editions of artists’ books for 10 years.  I made my first animation while I was doing a Postgraduate Diploma in Electronic Imaging in Dundee around 1999.

What prompted you to move into moving imagery?

I was printing and binding these small editions of prints and artists’ books, sometimes only 10 copies of each.  I was able to sell them to museums and galleries, including New York Public Library, Museum of Modern Art, New York, but I could only show them to a few people before they were no longer pristine enough to sell.  I was also keen to try and expand my storytelling options, and I was very attracted to the darkness and drama of the cinema, as well as the ability to add sound and humour through timing and movement, so animation was a really exciting next step.

Still from The Debutante by Lizzy Hobbs

So presumably, narrative was a big part of your art practice before moving into animation as well?

Yes, I’ve always loved storytelling.  Although that wasn’t the only part of the process that I carried over from my printmaking practice into animation, I try to retain a combination of the experimental and methodical in my attitude to animation, and I always try to respond to the materials possibilities of the medium.  In that way I don’t think you can become bored or run out of ideas.

The Debutante was based on a short story written by the artist, Leonora Carrington. Can you tell me a bit about her and how you came across her work originally?

I knew a bit about Leonora Carrington, I admired her feminism, and her surrealist paintings, and then five years ago I read her short story called The Debutante. I didn’t even know that Leonora Carrington wrote short stories. I was really struck by it, I just couldn’t believe how bold it was.  She wrote the story in 1938, in French, which wasn’t her first language, and in translation it has a bald syntax that sort of really tells it without any fanfare. I just loved it.  It’s semi-autobiographical; she had also been presented as a debutante at the court of George V, and didn’t want to go down the route of being married.  She escaped with Max Ernst to France and then wrote this story based on her experience of that.

Still from The Debutante by Lizzy Hobbs

What were the circumstances?  Did you have to make contact with Leonora Carrington’s estate in order to get permission to make the film?

I first contacted the Leonora Carrington Estate in 2016. I wrote them a letter saying I really loved the story and was there any chance I could adapt it for animation. They initially didn’t want to, they were very polite, but they didn’t want an adaptation. I kept in touch with them and then when I got the BAFTA nomination for I’m OK in 2018 I thought perhaps having made a successful film about the artist Kokoschka would reassure them that I wasn’t going to do anything that would be detrimental to her memory.  It maybe wasn’t to do with that, but they said yes, and at the same time Abigail Addison from Animate Projects came on board and we were lucky enough to get BFI funding to go into production.

So the film, like many of your previous films, has a new experimental process, this time incorporating elements of rotoscoping. Your work is always so expressive and fresh, what was new or unique for you on this project?

Thank you, I included rotoscoping because I wanted the film to feel like it was set in 1938, when it was written, so that the story makes more sense.  It’s important that we are embedded in the world of smart clothes, grand houses and a social occasion in which you have to get everything just right.  Only then can we appreciate the surreal contrast with the smelly hyena in the zoo and the chaos that she brings to the event.

There’s a real joy and freedom to your work. Why is experimentation so important to you as an animator?

Oh, good question. I love talking about that!  I think for me animating can be a bit boring if you know exactly how everything is going to turn out from the beginning.  Robert Breer made a suggestion that when he was about to animate he experienced a heightened awareness, which I really resonate with. It feels like an excited readiness.  So I always tried to make something that is a bit surprising for me as well as other people.  I usually try to see what I can manage without and try to capture it all in the moment, under the rostrum.  You could make The Debutante film in a hundred different ways, every animator would do it differently and it’s so good that I think it would always make a great film, but in my adaptation I wanted to recognise the wildness in the story so that it really kind of shines out of the image, this shocking, joyful story that she’s written.

I find that interesting, like you say, because everybody approaches filmmaking – particularly animation – differently. Obviously, you had the text you were basing the film on but when you first approached a film like this, what comes into your mind? Do you come to a film with a kind of visual idea or any kind of motif or any scenes? Or is it very much based on text and mood or energy?

It’s a really good comment, because sometimes when I’m working with students who are making an important film to them, they often procrastinate with scripts and storyboards, and I ask “Is there something you can just put down?  A place that you can start, an image or animated sequence that you really like so you can just dive into it?” (alongside the important work of storyboards and animatics!)

Funnily enough, in this story, there’s this scene in which a bat comes in the room from outside and she jumps behind the sofa. And that was the image that I had in my mind for ages. I kept animating it.  And actually, it didn’t make it into the film and everything else became kind of more exciting as I was going along. But this bat and her behind the sofa was originally quite a key moment that I was focused on. As I made the film, she became a bit bigger and a bit more powerful. And her cowering behind the sofa didn’t work in the end.

Still from The Debutante by Lizzy Hobbs

The film was made in collaboration with Animate Projects and with the BFI Short Form Animation Fund – what was the process like from application to final delivery?

It’s always brilliant to have the chance to work with Abigail Addison at Animate Projects.  We applied as a team for the first round of the BFI Short Form Animation Fund.  It opened for applications just as we had been given permission to use the story.  Abigail was really excited by Leonora Carrington’s The Debutante as well and we had worked together on a few films before, so we were in a good position to apply.  The fund allowed us to work with my long term collaborator, the editor Mark Jenkins, who brings a lot of story rigour, and then we were able to work with composer Hutch Demouilpied. She was a really fantastic addition to the team, she has so many ideas, especially on the theme of radical women, which was a really wonderful aspect of this project.  We could work with three brilliant actors, and Fonic, who always bring high quality and creative sound design.  We wouldn’t have been able to do all of that without the BFI funding.  I’m not sure how high priority animation production funding is in the UK at the moment, so we were really glad that the film was received so well. The film travelled to over 100 festivals, was shortlisted for an Academy Award, as well as picking up many awards including at Clermont-Ferrand and SXSW.  It proves that there is a great appetite and appreciation for narrative animations, even if they are on the experimental side of things.

So did you use an animatic in order to pitch?

Yes, I find it quite hard but I did manage to produce an animatic. I worked with it the whole production, popping in the new scenes and sending the cuts up to Mark Jenkins in Orkney. Hutch Demouilpied composed what she termed ‘brushstrokes’ for us to work with as well.  So the animatic was quite a loose and creative document but it functioned well, and in this case it didn’t change wildly because the story had this quite clear structure already. I put off the dinner scene until the end, because I knew that was going to be really hard, all those people eating and screaming and shouting. So I worked from the beginning forwards.

So you’re a very busy person? How do you fit filmmaking around everything else you’re involved with? Or does everything else sort of fit around the filmmaking?

Actually I’m not so busy at the moment, I have a nice balance. I have a lovely job as senior lecturer at NFTS for 2 days a week, and I have 2 or 3 studio days.  I’m collaborating on a new piece with composer Carola Bauckholt, who I made The Flounder with, we are making something for live performance next year.  At the same time I’m also developing a new short film of my own, hopefully with Animate Projects, which might be ready in around 2025.

The 2024 British Animation Awards take place at the BFI Southbank Thursday March 7th.
For more on the work of Elizabeth Hobbs visit lizzyhobbs.wordpress.com

The post The Debutante | Interview with Director Elizabeth Hobbs appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Alan the Infinite (Parabella Studios/Blink Industries)

Bringing together their strength for unique narratives, self-aware humor and graphic stop-motion design, the creative partners have teamed up with BLINK INDUSTRIES and an ace team of creatives to create a world with quirky new characters. The film boasts an approach to design that combines an old-school traditional puppet look with their continued use of practical, in-camera effects blended seamlessly with contemporary processes and modern technology such as 3D scanning (read below for more details) that come together to create a bold, unique look.

Alan the Infinite is a tantalizing appetizer to something far more epic, which reflects the directors’ desire to create a longer-form story for the titular hero, with ample opportunity for sci-fi exploration, comedic mishaps and joyous new characters.

Skwigly were lucky enough to get to talk to Mikey and Dan about their respective career paths, the reason behind the stalled project launch and all things Infinite, ahead of the release of their behind-the-scenes video showcasing the work and talent behind the film itself.

I really appreciate the central idea of the film, this notion that we are (particularly in the UK) very much pressured into picking a career and life path very early on and how that can be very difficult and doesn’t work for everyone. Can you talk a bit more about where that idea came from?

Dan Ojari: Thinking back to what it’s like to be 16 or so, there was so much change on the horizon. I think these multiple forks in the road inevitably lead teenagers to feel a huge amount of pressure for many reasons. Not just external pressures of what grades or type of job you’re going to get, but also the internal pressures of what sort of person are you, what friendships will last and what new ones you’ll make. You’re at the very beginning of your journey as an adult and charged with so many possibilities. This theme, which is central to Alan The Infinite, emerged out of digging into our own experiences, alongside the backdrop of Alan being an intern at a workplace that’s obsessed with stopping change. It felt like the perfect way to explore those ever-changing external and internal pressures of a young adult.

Mikey Please: Yes! I think it’s a very common feeling. I acutely remember being sixteen, having to choose just three A-level subjects and feeling the pressure, a kind of existential dread, that this was the paramount fork in the road of destiny. If i got it wrong, my whole life would go wrong. nonsense of course, but that’s the pressure we put on young people. In hindsight, it’s an absurd notion that, somehow, at sixteen, you’re expected to know what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. Since all the atoms in our body are replaced every seven years, i think you should never plan more than seven years ahead, you have no idea who you’re going to be after that. it wasn’t until my second year of Uni (I had gone to study Fine Art sculpture, then hopped ship onto an animatronics course) that I focused in on the world of animation.

Working in the arts and animation is a dream job for most but I’m always super interested to know what people would have done if they hadn’t found animation or if it hadn’t worked out for them. What other careers did you consider?

DO: I was home educated up until the age of 15, so I spent most of my childhood outside of the normal educational system. I guess I was fortunate to have parents who always supported me to pursue what I was interested in, which for me was art. But when I finally joined formal education my love for art got very quickly crushed and so I decided I’d be a scientist instead! I changed courses and loaded up my timetable with science-based courses – I could see a whole exciting sci-fi esc future ahead of me. However, this only lasted a few months until I realised I wasn’t really smart enough to be a scientist, so I went back to art! Now as an adult, I think if I wasn’t working in the arts, I’d love to teach, but probably not the science lessons.

Alan the Infinite (Parabella Studios/Blink Industries)

MP: I had a place to study anthropology at Goldsmiths, which, following a mid-teen crisis, I swapped out for an Art foundation at Bath College. A quick google tells me I could have been a Professor, A museum Director or an Advertising Executive. I like the idea of a professor, but the Indian Jones kind.

I can see you were both quite involved with the physical making of the puppets and sets, it reminds me slightly of George Pal’s work and also Camberwick Green but with a more contemporary and geometric design, what was your vision with the look of this film?

DO: The look of the world sort of started with the character of Alan, I had a collection of wooden dolls and painted wooden folk art and always thought the visual language and materials would make a strong stop motion character. After building a maquette of him, Mikey suggested we go one further and expand the approach to the whole world. In the end, we created a rule that everything must be made from wood (or shiny laminated plastic). We found using simplified wooden shapes and hand painted details, not only looks wonderful but also somehow looks both old fashioned and contemporary, which again was perfect for the themes in the film.

MP: Yes! George and Camberwick were no doubt pinned to our inspiration board. Though for almost all of our projects, when it comes to design, I think our main north star is the world of illustration. I expect that was true for George too! There’s something about the clarity of character and composition in the illustration world that excites us, and the really great stuff, like stop-motion, manages to retain that human fingerprint. Alan the Infinite is our furthest lean into marrying stop-motion with illustration by animating the face in 2D and hopefully striking a balance between precise expression, graphic punchiness and that human touch. I guess that balance of chaos and control has some thematic tie ins to the subject of the film too. But it’d be pontificating to say more than that.

You’ve been sitting on this project for a little while, what caused the delay in release and what made you feel the time was right now?

DO: Firstly we need to say a huge sorry to the cast and crew for not releasing it sooner! We made the film with a phenomenally talented and enthuistic bunch of people, over 5 years ago. However, almost as soon as we finished Alan The Infinite another of our projects Robin Robin was green lit by Aardman and Netflix. So we put the release on hold and never found the right moment to release it, until now!

MP: There’s a complicated answer to that which probably isn’t very interesting. But easiest to say that for years we’ve been scratching our heads as to how to cleverly release it. Then I saw a talk by Kirsten Lepore last October and she advocated not holding things back and letting the universe steer a while. That struck a note and here we are.

You have also mentioned that Alan was intended to have a longer story or even be the linch-pin in an anthology series, do you still have hopes/plans for this?

DO: Yes, the initial idea of Alan The Infinite came from an anthology series I was writing called The Fax Machine Fables, about several strange sci fi stories all set against the backdrop of drab offices. When we started developing Alan The Infinite as a stand alone idea, we used lot’s of the themes and ideas from this anthology to work it into a longer story and initially wrote it as a 10 part mini-series. The incomparable, Over the Garden Wall had just been released and we thought it would pave the way for a whole new coming-of-age mini-series frenzy! However once we finished writing the scripts we realised we’d essentially written a feature, and perhaps that would be the best way to tell the story. So currently the longer story exist in both mini series and feature form.

MP: As Dan says, this is a slice of a much longer story that’s taken a few shapes over the years. When Over The Garden Wall knocked everyone off their seats, we had this kind of naive idea that the world would rapidly embrace that beautiful format, a brilliant mix between longer and shorter form storytelling. But yes, we’re now imagining it as a feature, which probably works better for Alan’s kind of story.

Alan the Infinite (Parabella Studios/Blink Industries)

It feels like we are only just getting to know Alan and the world he lives in, what other ideas do you have for him?

DO: We also wrote a sort of sequel that runs alongside the events of Alan The Infinite but told from Priya’s (his office love interest) point of view. We were heavily inspired by the format of the sci-fi classic Ender’s Game and it’s parallel story sequel – Ender’s Shadow.

MP: But as for Alan, you’ll have to watch the movie/series/series of pamphlets. But safe to say there’s are a lot of laminated layers to Lamin’8.

Side question: just out of curiosity, was the green apple in the opening sequence a nod to Het Klokhuis by Johnny Kelly at all?

DO: Ah! Excellent reference. We love Johnny Kelly, but afraid it wasn’t consciously a direct reference.

MP: We’re such huge fans of Johnny! I’d argue it’s impossible to make contemporary stopmotion without being influenced by him in some way. He’s a truly visionary artist who never stops surprising.

I see that you (Mikey) were the lead compositer on the film. Could you tell me more about how you used 3D tracking to superimpose the 2D animated faces?

MP: Yes, this was a real test of my compositing skills. We had a lot of guidance from Quentin Vien who set up the pipeline. On set, there was a bit of 3D scanning of the puppet heads, measuring the focal lengths from camera to puppet. Then we 3D tracked the footage, applied that to the CG head models and outputted that data as UV matts which then allowed us to animate the 2D in After Effects. It makes me sweaty just thinking about it.

Alan the Infinite (Parabella Studios/Blink Industries)

What are your plans for the film now that it has been released?

DO: We only hope that in some small way it helps unite and inspire the lamination companies of the world to put an end to all change, once and for all.

MP: I’m planning to sit back and scoop up the retrospective Oscar’s for best unproduced pilot. Waiting for that phone to ring. Any. Minute. Now…

For more on the work of Mikey Please and Dan Ojari visit parabellastudios.com

The post Alan the Infinite | Interview with Mikey Please & Dan Ojari appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

After a very successful festival run, winning multiple awards including the Annecy Jury Award 2022 as well as being nominated for the short animation Oscar. We were fortunate enough to get some time with Špela and dig down into the development, funding, creation and reception of the film;

My understanding is that the script was written by your partner, Gregor Zorc. Can you tell me about that collaboration?

We’ve been collaborating since my first professional film, Boles, so it’s pretty normal for us. This time it was very much his own idea, then the script and the idea were developed together. I think this was the first script that had a very strong ending but needed to be built up.

The film itself shows a form of domestic, psychological violence coming to a boiling point – what inspired this?

Mostly observing way too many couples around me who are just drowning in these toxic relationships and are incapable of realising that it’s maybe not the best for them. Actually, I realised that it’s really difficult to talk with them about it. Somehow, I feel that film is a kind of communication. It’s a very difficult topic to open up about, I think.

Image: Finta Film

This kind of weaponizing of love within relationships is really awful, but sadly, quite common in our society. What did you personally uncover whilst exploring this within the film?

Actually, I was super surprised that the audience were not reflecting on their personal relationships. Not just partner relationships, but also seeing their mother torturing them in this way when they were children, or in so many different aspects. This sort of thing is not only between romantic partners, although I think it’s strongest in these kind of relationships, but it can be in all sorts of relationships. So that’s what actually struck me afterwards, was this reflection on your own experience and even that some people don’t have, or are lucky to not have, experienced something like that and it made them uncomfortable. It is probably a bit of an uncomfortable film, I guess.

The film is also a return to your beloved multiplane setup, but taking the process even further. There are some shots in the film that I find particularly fascinating, like the bubbling of the fat on the steak. How is this achieved and what were the most interesting shots for you to figure out or do in the film?

I think the bubbling and the cooking was especially fun for my animator, she really loved all the precise bubbles. They are just redrawn with each frame, I think we combined a lot of painting under the camera with the cutouts. I think this is a very nice combination, because it can be drawn very precisely. It can actually come to life with just a little bit of highlight or shadow. My favourite scene was something that we tried a lot to achieve, which was the smoke. I always love playing with the complete, almost abstract scenes, but they are still super real, and they overtake the emotions with the visuals. That’s something I tried to achieve. But then the most difficult scenes are probably the ones that have to have all sorts of details and where a lot of layers have to move at once. And those were the ones that we were then preparing for a long, long time.

Are those the ones that you pre-animated?

Yeah. Sometimes we pre-animated and then we printed them out and coloured each frame and it was actually fun.

There was a really interesting process that you used with the cels ,where you sort of scratch into them and then seem to back-paint them with oil paint. Where did that come from?

 I think this is a little bit of graphic art, like lithography. Some of the graphics are done with plastics as well, and those scratches are coming from that painting technique.

A bit like printmaking processes, such as etching?

The dry needle was a tool from printmaking. So, it comes from there.

It’s an incredibly cinematic film. The first time I watch a film, I always try to figure out how it was done and there’s some scenes in the film that, on first viewing, I just couldn’t understand how you managed to achieve. The spoon, for example, I just can’t figure it out, was it achieved through replacements?

It was replacements. But this was one of the rare scenes that was composited on the computer. We animated the man separately from the spoon. But the spoon was just a replacement. Twenty-five spoons and then it was masked into the scene, with After Effects.

Image: Finta Film

Amazing. The whole thing is just fascinating. You mentioned the smoke, which is a really big part of the film, because it kind of represents this mounting pressure that you are feeling as she is trying to get home. It sort of represents toxicity, both in choking on the smoke, but also in the relationship. Can you give me any further insight into that process, or why the smoke was so integral to the film?

I think one aspect is showing his anger with this heavily-smoked apartment. I think we all know how difficult it is if you live in an apartment, and then if it’s full of smoke, it’s awful. Everything stinks. And if you do that on purpose, it’s already torturing the person. To achieve it we actually found this frosted cel, developed to draw with normal pencils or pastels. If you press them on paper the cutouts are sharp, but if you move these frosted cels away then everything gets blurry – that was the only effect that we used. My technician built a special add-on for the multiplane that was animatable by rolling this one glass layer up and down. This is how we animated, and it was actually beautiful because you could create transitions between one and the other. When it was completely blurry, we could do something else underneath, then you press the layer down and you have the sharpened image again.

So, was it just two planes that you were sort of moving up and down to create that kind of undulating smoke?

Yeah.

Image: Finta Film

Incredible. The ending is delightfully brutal and feels very cathartic for the central character, Liza. Do you know where that idea came from? Why did you feel it was important to round out the story in that way for her?

I think it was very important to know that this was not a onetime torture, that this is actually the edge of years of psychological violence. That was very important for the story, for all the details, her reactions, that she’s trying to not provoke even further. When the exact idea for the ending came, I think Gregor would have the real answer. But I think it was meant to be more metaphorical, that our tongues can be a weapon as well. I was afraid that it was going to be taken more in a way about eating one another but that was not my idea. It was more trying to achieve the idea of verbal violence with the tongue.

Sort of like removing his weapon?

Exactly, and that violence is very often provoked with violence, as well. I’m sometimes asked if that was my #MeToo moment or something like that, but I didn’t see it that way. I’ve heard critics say “Why is the man the one who is aggressive?” But statistically, 95% of the time, men are the aggressors. So yeah, that’s why.

Image: Finta Film

It’s interesting because watching it, it was surprising, but I remember it didn’t feel horrific, more like the natural reaction to that situation. It’s tremendously encouraging to see both a filmmaker like yourself with a film like this that uses a more classic process being shortlisted for an Academy Award. How has the journey been with the film not just for the Oscar nomination, but with the festival circuit and audiences?

I think it was received super well. I mean, I have to say that I’m spoiled with these awards and selections. It was very important for me to see Steakhouse in public. I really loved sitting in the cinema, while observing the film, and hearing the reaction. I think this is one of the loudest reaction films I’ve made. It’s very interesting that different audiences react completely differently. Like, if I was with a younger audience, they would even laugh through the whole film, but what was always common was that the public reaction was always very loud. This is always very important for me, too. During the lockdown, because we just finished the film before this lockdown started, and I was asking myself “Will we ever sit in a cinema again with an audience?”  For me, having the premiere in Locarno with, I think over 1000 people in the cinema, it was just so amazing. It was so beautiful. Then just a few weeks later, I had the film online in Ottawa and I was crying, because my film is really not intended for the little screen, and especially if the resolution goes down the smoke becomes pixelated and it was so, so terrible. I was really starting to wonder, should I start using another technique that is going to work online? Or, should we make films differently? Because they’re completely different if you are imagining them for watching with the public in a cinema, or watching them at home. It’s a different media. So luckily, I think we are out of that.

In regard to the making of the film, you made it predominantly during COVID, right?

No, just the post-production. The production was, I think, a year and a half to two years, until COVID. We planned to finish in a few months, but then it was over a year before we finished the film because I had a co-production between Germany and France. The post-production had to happen in Germany and we were waiting for the borders to reopen. It was a nightmare, and I didn’t even know what still needed to be done. It was awful.

Was that just because of the global situation, or do you think it would have been hard even without that?

In the end some things were done later on in Slovenia, because it was just not possible to finish it on time and go to Germany with the borders closed. Then I realised that I would have to do the colour correction in Hamburg and stuff like that. I found out that just next door to my house, there is a great colour correction studio and I’m wondering “Are those co-productions really always necessary?” Sometimes we do it because we think we’re going to save money. But in the end, there’s a lot of unnecessary travelling.

Image: Finta Film

And how did the opportunity to actually make the film come to be? Was it after Nighthawk? And then you went into development with this?

I had another project in development, about the refugees on Balkan borders, but then I realised that I don’t really know how they feel, I don’t know what it is like to hold your child and be freezing out in minus-something temperatures. So, I decided not to make a film that I can’t be personally involved with, because that is always my motivation, that I am very personally involved with the story that I’m telling. I do believe that this makes the films stronger and more honest than just saying something that you’ve seen on the news. So that was something in between.

So then did you and Gregor have this idea for Steakhouse and go out and pitch it? Or did people come to you on the back of Nighthawk to ask if there was a film you wanted to make next?

We got some funding in Slovenia, but it was not enough. And we were trying to get German funding because I studied in Germany, and I still have co-workers that I love to work with. But they are expensive, and we can’t afford them. And then we thought it would be good to go to France, because France has a lot of money and producers. Actually, they are one of the rare countries in Europe that really value artistic animation. So, we went to pitch at Clermont-Ferrand. That was one of the experiences where we found the French co-producer. But the week before that, we found out that we got German money, so then suddenly, we were pitching for something that we didn’t really need. But pitching is still quite good to test your script because you have your first audience, you can see if the story’s working or get the first feedback from the public. That was quite nice.

Image: Finta Film

And so what’s next for you?

I’m slowly thinking of a new film, developing something, which is still very blurry. But we’ll see. You know when I finish a film, I always want to start something more experimental, less narrative. And then in the end I end up doing a narrative.

 Do you think you’ll use the multiplane again?

Maybe I’m a little bit tired of multi-planes after two films, so maybe something else. I’m not sure yet. I’m really quite open at the moment.

You can follow Špela Čadež on Instagram and see more of her work on here. 

The post Steakhouse | Interview with Director Špela Čadež appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)

The film centres around a post-mortem photographer, a Victorian-era practice that was both eerie and terribly sad. When/how did you come across this practice, and what made you make want to make a film that explored it?

I read an article years ago on post-mortem photography; as you say, it is very sad as well as being eerie from our modern perception. A lot of people couldn’t afford photography as it was a bit expensive at the time. So the one time they actually bit the bullet and said, “Okay, we’ll splash out” was actually at the end of a relative or a loved one’s life, just to remember them. So it wasn’t too unusual at the time, but kind of sad and, from our point of view, a little bit eerie. I thought it was a crazy kind of curiosity and I wanted to write a story from the point of view of the weird and unsettling, because that’s the audience that’s gonna get to see it.

I noticed on my rewatch today that you co-wrote it with Laura O’Flanagan, who also voiced the female character – can you tell me about that collaboration?

Laura is my wife. She is a guidance counsellor in a secondary school in Dublin, where she’s also doing a PhD in children’s literature. I was writing and we were getting a lot of support from Screen Ireland, who funded us in terms of the writing, and they were great. We were working on drafts and drafts and drafts and there is a lot of subtext and visual innuendo, contrasting what the voiceover is saying and what the visuals are on screen. But at a certain point, I was completely wrung dry. I had nothing left in the bank, and the script wasn’t finished. So she said “I can give you a hand, what are you trying to say?” So I’d say, “Okay, the visuals are going to be this but I want the subtext to be this, etc.” So I would give a bit of an overview and she actually started taking the laptop and giving me options. At one stage, I kind of stopped writing altogether and I would just be directing her as she wrote. We’re actually doing another one at the minute – very, very early stage, we’re still bashing around the idea. But it’s very female-focused, so I’m just giving her the laptop completely, she’s writing this new one 100%.

If it’s not too early to ask, is it in a similar vein to Memento Mori?

Yeah, it’ll be a similar tone. If Memento Mori is A Christmas Carol, then this new one is maybe like Saint Maud, or The Wicker Man or something like that.

Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)

Oh, all of my favourites! That’s very exciting. Could you tell me a little bit about how you found the time to produce Memento Mori around your commitments as director at Boulder Media?

We scrambled; it was very tough. As you know yourself, you’ve made short films and great ones at that, but it is an itch that you need to scratch. I’m very fulfilled in my day job, I get to work on some great primetime shows and kid’s shows, but there was still that part I wanted to try out. So it wasn’t like I had spare time but I just really wanted to do it. We applied to Screen Ireland and we were lucky enough to get a grant to make the film, and then it was trying to squeeze it in. But I remember when I was making it, I was watching one of those Oscar roundtables with all the current nominees and they would be asked “How did you make yours?” Be it DreamWorks, Disney, Pixar, it didn’t matter, it was still a scramble, however big your studio is, to get resources, because all those resources are paid for by other projects. So you’re trying to get someone that has a little bit of time in the evening, or who wants to do some work at the weekends, and they’re all on board, then when you get around to it in four months, they can’t do it anymore. So there’s a lot of people on the credits for the short, because people took little bits here and there and it was really “have you got an afternoon? Have you got a day? Would you like to work on the film?” It was just getting time wherever we could.

Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)

Can you tell me a little bit about the style of the film and what you were tapping into, visually?

I think here in the west, we feel that animation needs to have a purpose; there has to be a reason why we chose to tell the story in animation rather than live action. So it kind of leads to having a fantastical element to our work, which shouldn’t probably be the case – if you look at Japanese animation, it’s just a different medium that they choose to do. But even in my head, even though I want to subscribe to that way of thinking, I still have that in the back of my head. Why are we doing it in animation? So I had the story I wanted to tell but I said, “Okay, let’s visually give it a reason”. I love the work of Mike Mignola, or Patrick Reynolds, those graphic novelists and comic artists, so we were aiming to make it look like a graphic novel which I explained to our art director Piotr Bzdura. And it was great, there was very little development, there was just “Here’s what I’d love, here’s what I’d like to see”. We have worked with Piotr on some development work in Boulder Media as well, so we had a shorthand already. We knew each other artistically. And I guess even if I wasn’t able to articulate myself well, he understood what I was looking for. So right out the gate, he had a couple of images and said “Is this what you have in mind?” And that was it exactly. So it was great, very short development, but he hit the nail on the head with that kind of graphic novel look for the film. It really works well with the story. Memento Mori is probably most akin to a kind of gothic ghost story or the work of authors like M. R James.

Would you consider yourself a horror fan in general? And what is your personal favourite kind of horror?

I love horror with more meat on it. I think it’s a great genre. I think it’s the best genre, I think there’s so much you can do with horror. You can tell things kind of superficially. Of all the Oscar-nominated movies and all the stuff that’s out at the moment, the best movie I’ve seen in ages was M3GAN, which I thought was just great fun. You can enjoy something just nice and fluffy like that, or you can layer it and have another layer of storytelling underneath. You can have such meaty subtext and when you realise the film isn’t about one thing but it’s about another, movies like The Innocents or The Exorcist – when you realise what the story is actually about, you get to enjoy it on a whole other level. So those are the horrors I love. I’m more into film horror, I listened to a few audiobooks of M.R. James and E.F. Benson. It was actually an E.F. Benson book I was listening to narrated by Mark Gatiss when I realised that was who we needed for this short. I think I was listening to him telling E.F. Benson’s The Room in the Tower while I actually was in a tower room in a castle in Cork, and there was lightning outside. I thought it was a perfect scenario.

Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)

How did you approach Mark about making the film? And what was his response when he saw it?

He loved the story. When we were writing, I could kind of hear the narration and I was like, “Who’s that voice?” Then when I realised it was Mark Gatiss, I was like “For God’s sake, we’re not gonna get Mark Gatiss!” We had a list of people that we would have loved, really great artists we were going to reach out to, but I knew that if I didn’t reach out to Mark Gatiss, I’d always wonder what he would have said. So I said “Come on, let’s just send it out and wait a couple of weeks, and then move on”. So our producer, Louise Ní Chonchúir, got in touch with his agent with the script. Weeks passed, nothing, we were ready to move on and he got back saying yep, he’d love to do it, which was crazy! So he recorded it in Soho Studios in London, it was in the middle of the pandemic. He was great and he really loved the story, which was very, very flattering. I’ve said it a million times but for me, he, literally, is the voice of horror. He has such knowledge of centuries of horror stories and they are kind of channelling through him. When we were doing the recording, I was saying “So, in this next bit, what the character is thinking is this, but what he means is this, in this kind of way…” and he’d refer back to some 19th-century short story and say “You mean like this?” He just knows it all.

Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)

He’s like UK Horror royalty.

Yeah, it’s not even just the films or TV shows or the books he reads. It’s also documentaries. I love his documentaries and he has such an infectious love for horror. It’s fantastic.

Definitely. In a similar vein, do you believe animation can be scary?

I do. I think it’s very hard. Some people think Memento Mori is scary and others don’t. It’s a little subjective that way. Sometimes it’s great when you’re in the cinema with maybe a hundred people and you hear a couple of screams. But it’s quite rare. I think it’s tricky when you’re doing something like animation, because the audience is inherently separated; they’re not seeing themselves on screen, they’re seeing these kinds of avatars. It’s different, so it’s very hard, but when you look at something like Perfect Blue then yes, animation can be terrifying. It’s quite tricky, I think, but something like Perfect Blue is just unreal and is one of the best horrors ever made, regardless of medium.

Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)

So, can you tell me a little bit about some of the more unique festivals the film has screened at?

We premiered in Galway in 2021 in July, with very, very limited access because of COVID, but in a beautiful outdoor space. Then we went to Grimm Fest in Manchester, and again we didn’t know how it was going to go, if people were going to come into the cinema, but loads of people went. It was lovely seeing the rise of the film festival again, because coming out of COVID we didn’t know if people were going to come back to the cinema or certainly festivals. From July 21st, six months after that, we went to a bunch of festivals, and you could see them getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it was really great. So we got to experience some really big festivals on a tiny scale because it was mostly online. That was quite interesting, but we’ve had such a great ride with it. We went to Rome twice for Irish Film Festa and we won an award and we were flown back. They had a big outdoor screen in the blazing heat on a Rome summer’s evening. We’ve gone to tiny festivals that are in a room above a pub. Crystal Palace was a massive festival, it was beautiful to see so many people there. There was one beautiful one we went to in Massachusetts called Woods Hole Film Festival, that was a stunning location and the organisers were great, they got all the filmmakers together to talk. That’s what we loved about the film festivals, when organisers would use it to pull all these talented people together and meet them and have a great time. Those are really special ones, I feel.

Fantastic. And the film’s won several awards now. What does that mean, in terms of short films for Boulder? You mentioned you’re working on a new film, but is that something you’re going to continue doing in general?  

I think so, because, for Boulder Media, we’ve been producing shows going back 23 years, for Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Disney, Netflix, now we’re producing shows for Fox. Through it all you need to try things technologically as well as aesthetically, and you don’t have much room when you’re producing a show, you can’t charge them money to try things out. So, in that way, I think that short films are really important for the company, to have something where you try out lots of different techniques and looks so that we can make art in that context, but also bring what we’ve learned to our day job.

Memento Mori is currently available to watch online in full at shorts.screenireland.ie
You can keep track of the film and any updates on the website. You can also follow Paul O’Flanagan on Instagram @pauloflanaganart and see more of the work of Boulder Media on their website.
For more on the making of Memento Mori, listen back to our filmmaker Q&A as part of 2022 edition of the Cardiff Animation Festival (stream below or direct download):

The post Interview with ‘Memento Mori’ director Paul O’Flanagan appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Boasting the masterful puppetmaking of Mackinnon and Saunders (Corpse Bride), the film is directed by del Toro and Mark Gustafson (Fantastic Mr. Fox) with a script by del Toro, Patrick McHale, Matthew Robbins and Gris Grimly (who also created the original design for the Pinocchio character) and produced by The Jim Henson Company and ShadowMachine in co-production with Necropia Entertainment.

Having worked in animation production since the early nineties, Georgina’s credits include Bob the Builder, Postman Pat and the Laika features Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls, with Guy having previously worked on other del Toro productions including Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and the upcoming Cabinet of Curiosities as well as TV series such as Steven Universe, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

The film represents such a strong new look for this story, which has as much to do with del Toro’s vision as the puppets and the design. Can I ask what do you both individually think is the most unique element of the film?

Guy Davis: It’s hard to narrow down as one element because there’s so many things that play off each other, from design to story.

Georgina Hayns: There is, isn’t there? To me, it’s very much Guillermo’s look and take on Pinocchio. And very much his vision of a stop-motion film. But yeah, I don’t feel like there’s one particular character that stands out any more than any other character. What I think is really interesting is the fusion of styles. You have quite humanoid characters and you’ve got animals talking, insects talking to humans, but it all works in the context of the story.

GD: They flow together, they inhabit the same world but not in a fanciful way that stands out. Cricket seems to fit next Geppetto as much as some of the other, more fanciful characters we haven’t seen yet. [They all] feel like they could exist in this world because the world itself is almost a caricature. I mean, it’s very detailed and realistic in texture and tone, but in structure it fits the characters that have to live in it.

So Guy, you’ve worked with Del Toro previously, correct?

GD: Yeah, we collaborate on a lot of concept design. It started before Pacific Rim, since then, we’ve worked on a lot of projects that didn’t come out and a lot of projects that did, like Crimson Peak and Shape of Water and other projects. It’s always been a really inspiring collaboration working with him.

And what was different this time?

GD: Well, for one, this was my first job as Production Designer, so that was a new role for me. And of course, I was usually doing live action, so this is my first foray into stop-motion. I did the Super 8 films when I was in junior high, moving clay around and growing up on Ray Harryhausen, but learning the ins and outs of stop-motion in the business from everyone at ShadowMachine and from Curt (Enderle) and Rob (DeSue), who have a history of working in stop-motion, it was incredible to just discover it all these years later again.

Guy Davis

Gris Grimly’s original book design was a strong inspiration for the main character of Pinocchio, could you explain how and why he felt like such a good fit for this vision of the film?

GD: Well, I think Guillermo would have to answer [for] what he saw in the [Grimly’s] design. I know we started with that and we then elaborated a little bit more, influencing it with more of Guillermo’s vision, as far as limbs being different and less of a cartoon, an abstract in the shapes and a little bit more of a caricature. So it was less angular and stuff. But I know we did do a lot of revisions in the proportions, which gave him a different stance. The unfinished head was a great idea from Guillermo, because that’s Geppetto carving him, being very careful on one side, and then as the night went on, and he was in his grief and a little bit drunk, it got a little sloppier as it went. So he was sort of this unfinished design by morning.

GH: It was interesting to see the arc of Pinocchio’s design from early days, from Gris’s original to the actual final, approved design, and be a part of that, hear Guillermo’s thoughts, hear Guillermo working with Guy through it. And then of course, getting it into MacKinnon and Saunders’ hands, because I didn’t really touch much of Pinocchio on site here. It went straight to MacKinnon and Saunders and this amazing puppet maker that I’ve worked with for years, Richard Pickersgill, he was the main tech wizard on it. Richard trained as an armature maker and came and worked out in Portland with me on several of the Laika projects. Through that he learned a little bit about 3D printing, and just took on that whole world, went back to Manchester and did things with the 3D printing world and making Pinocchio that we’ve never seen before, and I think really brought that character to life.

Georgina Hayns

Could you talk a little bit more about Pinocchio’s construction?

GH: One of the wonderful things about working on Pinocchio – there weren’t secrets. Stop-motion is an age-old art form and one thing that I was trained in my early years, by Pete Saunders and Ian MacKinnon, was you can only improve the art form if you share your knowledge. I think it’s also the timing that Pinocchio came about in 3D printing, because the technology has changed enough that the different metals can be used for printing now, which lend themselves more for puppet skeletons than the metals that they started off printing with. So it was just the perfect moment in time in 3D printing, and Richard’s brilliance and understanding of armature making and 3D printing came together to make Pinocchio. We had a wonderful little moment in Portland when myself and Brian, the Head of Animation, were trying to figure out how we were going to solve the eyes. Traditionally with 3D printed faces, we split the face in half to get all of the expressions of eyebrows and eyes and everything. So Pinocchio doesn’t really have eyes, he has holes, and he also has woodgrain. So the idea of splitting a face with woodgrain was going to be a nightmare in post to fix that. So I had this mad idea, I was like, “Well look at the design, his eyes are the knots in the wood, can we just work those a little more perfectly into circular knots and take the entire eye and use that as a replacements, so it’s the eye that is the replacement part?” And by changing the eye shape, we were able to also create a brow, so the brow became a void between the eye sockets. That was just a bit of problem solving with car body filler, a hard head, and then “What do you think Guillermo? Do you like it?”

GD: That’s the thing that I love, is that there’s this communication between all the different departments, between design and building and how those feed on each other. It’s great that we can always say “Well, this is why something works in a design way” and they can say “Well, this needs to change for practical ways to work” and sometimes it brings everything back again. Now all of a sudden, this brings back to the design of his eyes being like knots, which is a very beautiful detail for the character, and it’s also a problem-solve.

It’s just perfect elegancy, when the problem-solving feeds back into the design in such a symbiotic way.

GH: They’re really special moments in puppet making when that happens.

GD: That worked out that way through the whole film, I can’t think of any character that we were disappointed with. There are difficult characters and designs that couldn’t be exactly as their concept was, for mechanics, or this or that. But the changes made it better, so it was never a frustration. It was more like “Wow, this solved the problem and made it better”.

You’ve both summarised this in a much more elegant way than I could have. But for me stop-motion has always been the art of problem-solving, and I was just wondering if there were any unique challenges that you found on the project that you’d like to talk about?

GH: For me, the eyes for the characters were the most challenging of all aspects. So with the human characters, especially, we wanted ball and socket eyes. But then we wanted silicone mechanical skins and the inherent problem with that is the minute you move an eyebrow up, it pulls a skin away from the edge of the eye, and you’ve suddenly got a big gap. So the tiniest part of all of the human designs was the biggest headache for all of us. We’ve got MacKinnon and Saunders working on it, we were working on it in Portland, we’ve got the best of the best trying to problem-solve how we could get a blink, an eye movement and an eyebrow movement without gaps appearing here, there and everywhere. And between us, we all came up with solutions but it took until the end of the movie for us all to go “Can we make the movie again? Because now we know exactly how to solve it!” (Laughs) But we all did actually say “Please can we never do ball and socket eyes in silicon skins ever again?” (Laughs) But yeah, in a weird way that was the most challenging thing, I think, from a puppet making standpoint.

It’s generally eyes and hands, are historically the hardest bit in stop-motion because they’re both so small but also completely eye catching and every human on Earth knows what those two things should move and act like.

GH: Yep!

(Netflix)

You have quite a legacy behind you, in terms of where you’ve worked and what you’ve worked on. What was the most enjoyable or interesting part of working on this project for you?

GD: I mean, it was an incredible experience. And it was unique in that, coming from live action, you’re on a production maybe a year, or year and a half, and you’re like, “Wow, that was a long production”. I started this originally back in 2012 and then, you know, we started again in 2019, and now here we are, and it’s being done. It’s a different pace and I think just seeing that passion, no one ever lost that drive or that interest over all these years about this story. And this project, it was always inspiring, it was always something that people were totally devoted to making special, it never felt like “Okay, let’s get this done”. It was like “Let’s definitely put everything we can into this”. And that was every aspect of the hundreds of people who worked on it, problem-solving, creating, and just spending the time and love to put into it. So that definitely speaks to the inspiration and talents that Guillermo brings, and Mark too, and everybody in every department. It’s just one of those things that you’re excited when you see it on screen and things are brought to life. But then all of a sudden, you think, “Wow, I was a much younger person when this started”!

GH: The fact that we all were there wanting to work together with two leaders, Mark and Guillermo, who wanted to give us all the information we needed to make a beautiful film. It was just this very special movie for me, because stop-motion films are always hard, with some crazy deadlines. We knew that the expectations were beyond some of the realms of the budget and the schedule, but we all had a wealth of experience. A lot of the crew had worked together for 15-20 years, on and off through different projects, and what we had learned over those 15-20 years is that the most important thing about puppet making and stop-motion movies as a whole is trust, communication, and information. If you haven’t got all of those three things, then it falls apart. You’ve got to trust the person next to you, you’ve got to trust in your team, you’ve got to trust in your boss. What was very apparent from the word go on Pinocchio is that we had a secure environment set up by ShadowMachine. And Mel Coombs, who is an amazing producer – I mean, at times she was a dictator, but it was brilliant, we knew she had our back all the way through. And whenever a problem arose, if things were getting too big, if things were running long, somebody would bring us together to talk about how we can solve the problem, how we can move forward as a team together. There was no blame, it was just this beautiful team effort to make something that was brought to us with love, and gave us love and we gave love back to it. There’s so much love, happiness and passion in this movie.

Pinocchio is set to be released in select theatres November 2022 and on Netflix December 2022

The post Pinocchio: Interview with Puppet Supervisor Georgina Hayns & Production Designer Guy Davis appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Did the opportunity come in to Blink first, and then you pitched on it? Or was it brought to you directly?

I’ve always loved Blink Industries; I love everything they make because they really push the medium and are willing to experiment. I sent them an email around two years ago, just saying that I really love their work and here was the work I did. Then I had a Zoom meeting with them, which was really nice. They said that if I wanted to send in anything else for them to look at, maybe we can make something together. A year went by and then James from Blink called me to ask if I’d be interested in animating an episode of Inside No. 9! It came out of nowhere. I was in a park somewhere when I got that phone call, and I had to lean against a tree because I felt like I was going to have a heart attack. Then that day, he sent the script over, then we developed a treatment, I actually made some animations based on the script because I didn’t want to let this opportunity slip by. I made three little fully animated clips with voices – that I got my girlfriend to do, pretending to be a little boy. We sent them all over and a week later I just found out I had the job. That was about eleven months ago now, it’s been agony waiting to tell people about it.

Did you get to meet and discuss the project with Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton personally and what did they ask for specifically?

Yeah, it was really collaborative. We had a lot of Zoom meetings, they knew they wanted it to be like Charlie Says, and all these creepy PSAs and I watched loads of them beforehand so already knew what their references were. The only real thing there was a lot of back and forth about was the character designs, because at first they looked a little too modern. I gave the boy spiky hair and he looked like a kid from maybe like 10 years ago. So, I just kept making the hair longer and longer. It became proper 70s and then they were like “That’s it” and signed off on it. They just wanted it to feel authentic and that was my main focus for the whole thing, making it look authentic and ageing it and kind of ruining it most of the time. With the software I use people want everything to be really nice and smooth, so I had to keep breaking things apart and putting in little mistakes.

Early character design (image courtesy of Sam O’Leary)

What other research did you do, and how did you combine that into the animation process and visual look of the segments?

Well, I couldn’t actually find that much on how they were made – Charlie Says, for example. I knew that most things back then were cut-out cels and that kind of thing. I knew we couldn’t do that because one, it was time-consuming and two, we then couldn’t change anything, which ended up happening; lots of things were changing as we were going.  Honestly, it was mainly visual and instincts. I didn’t know exactly how they did it, I just tried as best as I could to replicate it. Almost all the characters were designed in Procreate, as there are so many good tools that look hand-drawn. I would maybe overlay a paper or paint texture. I made many different versions of each head and the arms etc, then I would just reel through them so it would twitch authentically and look like someone was moving something. Like with The Lego Movie where it’s not stop motion, but they wanted the plastic to look realistic, so they added fingerprints, scratches and seams and mistakes. I love that. So, I was trying to do that a little bit. I guess I was trying to get as close as possible to the originals without it taking like two years for me to make. After Effects was perfect for getting down into the very specific details, adding a twitch in the right place and making sure that it’s never too long until there’s another little ‘error’.

Your personal back catalogue of work is quite eclectic. Often straddling the line between horror and comedy, much like the work of Pemberton and Shearsmith. How do you feel animation aids in combing those two genres or themes?

I think animation is so great, because there are basically no limits to what you can do, if you want to make someone look scary, you can just make them 10 times the size of somebody, but it doesn’t break the reality too much. I love it for that reason, it’s so easy to change the tone of something in a way that you wouldn’t ever be able to do if you were filming something, it just feels very freeing. With horror and comedy, did you ever watch Monkey Dust? Because that did it perfectly. There were some sketches they did that weren’t even funny, one recurring sketch was of a man who had broken up with his wife and his son comes over every week, but the son hated coming over to his dad’s because his house is all cheap and depressing because his mum got everything. And every time the sketch ends with him, shooting himself in the head upstairs because his kid was so horrible to him. Then the sketch would just end, and it wasn’t even funny. I really liked that, I like things where there are funny moments, but it’s not a comedy.

Wise Owl storyboard (courtesy of Sam O’Leary)

I don’t mind admitting that I’m incredibly jealous. This is a gig that I’m sure lots of people would have loved to work on. What was the whole experience like for you?

An absolute dream come true, obviously. I’ve loved them since I was a little kid, I have quoted them my whole life, I’ve received League of Gentlemen birthday cards because I liked it so much. I honestly can’t believe it’s happened; I think up until 10pm on the night it aired, and I saw for a fact that it was on there, I just couldn’t believe it – and because I haven’t been animating for ages it was also quite nice to have that passion recognised. I think in the treatment that Blink and I made, it was so obvious that I was a fan. I was like “maybe we can even animate the hair and hide it in there, we could do subliminal messages…” I just needed to throw everything at it. So, they knew how much I cared about the show. The whole thing has just been completely unreal. Watching the episode for the first time as it was going out live was the happiest I’ve ever been. It was crazy. A friend of mine has a little cinema, so me and like five friends watched it in a tiny cinema. I had like an old fashioned, people were laughing, and my friend cried. One of my friends surprised me by dressing as an owl. He already had an owl costume, apparently, but he printed out a mask of the wise owl. The whole thing has been completely unreal, and I’ve loved every single minute of it. Working with Louise, the director was brilliant. We talked on the phone quite a lot and it really felt so collaborative. There was very little pushback on things creatively. It really felt like they were allowing me to express myself, more than I think you would on a different project of this scale.

So, the episode is actually quite dark, I think it may be the darkest one they’ve done to date. Which also mirrors the darkness of both the subject of those early short 70s PSAs and some of the darker elements behind them. The animation is used as a narrative device throughout to explain the central character’s mental state as well as his warped memories. Were you kept in the dark about the overall story and were you able to slip in any small secret nods to other things?

No, I think they thought it was important for me to know absolutely everything, because they needed the animations to fit seamlessly in the episode and not feel like they were just stuck on. In fact, I was there when they were filming the green screen sections with Ronnie (Reece Shearsmith) and I got to kind of direct a little bit as well. That was the very first thing we did, there was no animation done at that point. So I’ve been involved during the whole thing. At first, I was really obsessed with details and suggested that we could add things like subliminal, sort of flashy things, then the producer said “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal and we’re not allowed to do that!” But other little things, like the doll that appears, is made to look like one of the girls from The Shining, but with kind of Coraline button eyes. The kite was meant to be a little like the carpet from the Overlook Hotel, another Shining reference, but without overdoing it too much. It was just red and orange, but it’s that kind of thing. In the carcass of the cat, when they’re eating sandwiches, in the veins I spelt the name ‘Mimsy’ as it was the name of the cat.  There were a lot of things that weren’t really easter eggs, but they were kind of alluding to what the story was about. In the background of the living room, there’s a broken brick texture that goes across it diagonally, and it looks kind of weird in the animation. But then you realise it’s in the actual living room in real life. So, we tried to emulate the geography of the room accurately, especially for the scene where the live-action and animation are mixed together.

Wise Owl test animation sequences (courtesy of Sam O’Leary)

Other than this episode, of course, which is your other favourite episode from Inside No. 9?

As it’s fresh in my head. I really enjoyed Mr King. I thought that that was fantastic.  I like the horrible ones really. I also like Sardines and A Quiet Night In, they really set up the whole thing of them using rules as a writing tool, limiting themselves and I think that’s such a nice kind of creative commitment. It puts you in a box that you then have to break back out of and do something really clever. So, I really liked those two. I loved The Devil of Christmas, I thought that was absolutely horrible. My all-time favourite is Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room.

Does rulemaking and setting limits also benefit you as far as the animation process is concerned?.

I’m really grateful that the rule for this was the sort of 70s PSA style, because if they’d approached me and said “The main character goes into an animation world, what do you want to make for that?” I think it would have been a lot harder and it would have taken far longer to find out what that would have been. Because they had such a strong sense of the story, and the animation style wasn’t just picked on a whim, it was intrinsic to the story, I was just really happy because it was such a strong starting point to begin with, so it wasn’t hard to work out what they wanted. It just fell into place.

Wise Owl design development (courtesy of Sam O’Leary)

You can watch Wise Owl and all other episodes of Inside No. 9 on BBC iPlayer. You can find out more about Sam’s work on his website and Instagram.

The post Interview with ‘Inside No. 9’ Animation Director Sam O’Leary appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

What makes this seemingly simple family sitcom so successful lies with its ensemble of characters that speak to the duelling mundanity and uniqueness in all of us; teen Tina (Dan Mintz)’s penchant for butts and lust for the undead, brother Gene (Eugene Mirman)’s iddy biddy diddy dreams for musical success, mom Linda (John Roberts)’s joyful optimism and naive scheming, dad Bob’s (H Jon Benjamin) world-weary anxiety for the future matched with an unflappable persistence and rabble-rousing third child Louise (Kristen Schaal)’s aggressive precociousness at odds with an attachment to her iconic pink rabbit ears. The film, much like the show, masterfully serves up both the chuckles and the feels, with a dash of peril and ludicrous adventure thrown into the mix. Skwigly spoke to series creator, producer and director Loren Bouchard, co-director and animator Bernard Derriman and writer/producer Nora Smith about bringing the Belchers to the big screen.

The show has such a strong and dedicated fan base. What is it, do you think, that has made the show so successful?

Nora Smith: I don’t like to think of it as successful. I think if we think about it too much, then we get too much in our heads and can’t just write good stories. Every time I think about the fans, some of the fans are more interesting people than I am, definitely. The fact that they dress up, and sew these costumes…at the premiere, a bunch of fans came out and I was just like “Oh my God, you are living life so much better than me”! I’m so happy I can write something that they like, because they’re incredible people.

One of the big reasons I’m a fan is the cast. When we record them together, I could sit in the recording booth and just watch and listen to them talk to each other forever. I think it comes across that they’ve known and worked with each other forever. So, they basically are a family and when you’re in the company of a family that you can tell loves each other, I feel like you feel loved. I think that carries across.

Could you tell me a little bit about how you developed the characters and which of them you each identify with most?

Loren Bouchard: We fit the characters to the actors, we cast first and really thought about the characters in relation to the voice that was going to be coming out of their mouths. We jumped light years ahead in terms of writing, you could write a more fleshed-out character when you already knew who was going to be giving them their voice. We already knew something about who they were and what kind of things they say. Which is just a good trick, for anyone out there who’s developing an animated idea, cast first and you will find your characters jump right off the page!

As far as identifying with the characters, for me it switches all the time. I’m Bob in the morning when I wake up and then, somewhere during the day, I become all of the other characters at least once, if not several times. I like to think at the end of the day after I’ve had a glass of wine I’m Linda.

NS: I do like how the characters can be different facets of a human personality. I personally am a Bob. I wish I was a Linda. Linda is my favourite character but I am the opposite of her. I love her dearly, her optimism.

Bernard Derriman: I have to say, especially after seeing the movie, I realised how much I am like Bob. And Ashley, my wife, is a lot like Linda.  I feel like our whole family are a lot of Bobs like me and she runs around picking us all up constantly.  I definitely resonate with Bob I think the most. I’m also about his age now and I say, ‘Oh God’ a lot.

I think I’m Louise with Linda rising. So why did you feel that this was the right time to make a movie?

LB: Well, there’s no good time to make a movie – or conversely, it’s always a good time to make a movie. I would say we definitely wanted this to be something that people saw in theatres. And so, in some ways, it was not the right time to make a movie, when theatres were shut down but we really had this extra onus, which is we already made a TV show, it’s already on your screens, in your house, in your living room, so we couldn’t turn it into a streaming movie, we really had to wait. It had to come out in theatres when it was safe to come out in theatres. We’re really big fans of movies, we love them. Not just sitting in a theatre, though, that is wonderful, but also the form itself. It’s a terrific storytelling form. It’s exciting, for a very good reason, which is something is going to fundamentally change for somebody in that story from the beginning to the end. It’s a deal you make when you go into a movie, it has to happen. And with us, we wanted it to happen for all of our characters. So, it was time for us, it wasn’t quite time for the world…and then it was!

On that, the film interweaves multiple story threads, some of which, as you say, come from the series as well. How hard was it to combine all of those threads into one cohesive narrative?

NS: It was hard. It was something we always knew we wanted to do; we didn’t want any of our family characters to feel like they were just along for the ride. And we liked the idea that each character was the hero of the movie in their own head, which is how it is in life. So, I think we just had to trim stuff down because there are a lot of storylines on the show, we have an A plot and a B plot, sometimes a C plot, but never a D, E, F plot. It was a fun challenge to have their emotional story also pushed forward and I think it felt more satisfying when everybody got to have an emotional journey in our family.

Animation wise, there’s a lot more scope for depth and cinematic spectacle in a feature film – how did that affect what you were able to do narratively, visually, and through the individual performances of the characters?

BD: Speaking visually, it was something we really relish because we would love to spend so much more time on the show, and we just never have that opportunity because we’re doing 22 episodes a year. So we’re just constantly churning through stuff. With the movie, we not only had all the characters but the stakes were also raised. So we had a lot of emotional moments in the movie, but we had all this time to really finesse, and we also had some of the best artists from the show working on the movie. Then the three of us just constantly push the animation, asking for little things like “Can we make sure that when that person walks, he’s walking in a straight line?” or whatever else, you know, but here we’re able to just get in there and say “Let’s lift that eyebrow up a little more”, “Let’s make Louise look a little sadder”. Those kinds of little subtle acting things we had the time to keep going back in and really get their performances where we wanted them to be. The other thing is we really wanted to make it part of the show, we didn’t want to do them in 3D or do anything where we recreate the characters in a different way. So, it felt different all of a sudden. We just took our characters from the show, we didn’t do anything to them. Hopefully, it looks prettier with the lighting. I always like to think of it as just the same as the show, but just with a better lens or camera, so you can see more.

Music and musicals are of course, synonymous with the show. Were there any differences or challenges in tackling the songs, specifically for the film over the series?

LB: We were thinking about music from the very beginning, and we knew we were going to try and make it true to us – which is to say, joyful songs that feel like they come right out of the show naturally and could only come from the show. That part we knew. We also wanted to hear just all the way out to the edges, go as big as we could with the sound without losing that sort of childlike innocence that we sometimes have in our music. So, we had horns in there and we purposely arranged the songs right from the very beginning with brass and woodwinds. So that we could really remind ourselves that it wasn’t just a ukulele and a piano, it wasn’t just those instruments that have served us so well on TV, because those are small, those are intimate. It’s great to start the show with a little instrument, because it’s telling you right from the beginning that it’s a fragile little thing, this restaurant that may not survive and this little fragile instrument playing the first few notes. But we didn’t want that for the feature. We wanted the opposite. We wanted people to feel like they were on the runway of a great story that was lifting off. We wanted all those strings and timpanies and every orchestral sound we could squeeze in. On top of that, we wanted dancing. We do dancing on the series when we can, but it’s time-consuming and hard to get right. Bernard is incredibly talented at it, so in some ways, this was a sandbox, turning him loose to play and have the time to draw dancing in the way that we knew we could do if we just had the time and the space on the screen.

Fantastic. As you mentioned you produced quite a lot of the film during COVID. How did this affect you and the crew overall?

BD: I think luckily, animation-wise, we didn’t really miss a beat. We were very fortunate. We all went home and then our producer, Janelle Momary, basically said to everyone “Come in, pick up your computers on Friday”. We had 10-minute windows – everyone had to come in, grab their stuff and run out. It was kind of crazy. Then the very next day we were just sort of back to normal and it weirdly felt like we’d been doing it forever, except we got to look inside everyone’s bedrooms.

Do you think you’ll do another Bob’s Burgers film again in the future?

LB: We would love the opportunity. Who knows how it’s going to do commercially and certainly we won’t do it unless we have the right story, but I can say this – making the movie was a pleasure from beginning to end and every little moment in between. We’d have to be crazy not to want to experience that again, it’s a real honour and it is such a good time.

If you ever wanted to conclude the show, do you have any ideas as to what might happen to any of the characters in the end?

LB: I know we all want for them to be happy and successful, for sure, to the extent that we’re optimists. I think we’re all optimistic about what’s likely to happen to these characters. But we also want to honour the moment, that this story is about a restaurant that is on the edge of failure; it is on the edge of success, too, but it’s on the edge, regardless. In a way, the second we start thinking past that moment I don’t think we’ll write as well. You really have to sit with it, you have to stay there in this moment, this time. The kids too, a fourth-grader, a sixth-grader and an eighth-grader, if you start ageing them up in your head you might start losing some of the grounding that we need to remember their ages. So in a lot of ways, we don’t go there, we resist the urge.

NS: You have to have faith and the optimism. The movie is, of course, a lot about optimism. And we try to tell a story where it’s actually mathematically, maybe better to be an optimist, which is hard for me as a pessimist to hear. But if you see it worked out in the end, I feel like you lose the faith aspect of it. You have to have faith that being hopeful is going to have this energy that takes you there.

LB: Also, success isn’t necessarily going to come in the form that you expect. Being an optimist means knowing it’ll work out somehow, even if it doesn’t work out the way you hoped.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie is out in cinemas today. From May 27th-June 2nd Cardiff-based audiences can catch special presentations of the film presented by Chapter and Cardiff Animation Festival featuring an exclusive Q&A with Welsh animator Simon Chong – more info available here.

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Will Anderson, whose BAFTA-winning graduation film The Making of Longbird was screened at over 50 film festivals internationally, has continued to develop his work ever since, working across multiple animation mediums, commissions and personal films. Frequently taking on metaphysical themes, his films are emotive, sensitive and humourous, recent work including his 2017 film Have Heart about the life cycle of a GIF-animated bird plunged into an existential crisis (that won the BAA Best Short Film award in 2018) and 2020’s Betty in which an animator processes his own recently-ended relationship through his characters Bobby and Betty; the short would go on to win a 2020 Scottish BAFTA. 

After working together on his graduation film, Will Anderson has frequently teamed up with long-term collaborator and fellow Edinburgh College of Art graduate Ainslie Henderson. Over the past decade the duo have co-written, directed and animated multiple projects together and have often lent their characters their own voices, bestowing them with wit and judicious use of Scottish idioms. Henderson himself is predominantly a stop-motion animator making use of uniquely organic puppets brought to life in a distinct, tactile fashion, such as 2015’s Stems. The following year Henderson won the BAA for Best Music Video in 2016 for James: Moving On, with previous BAA wins including the Student Excellence award in 2014 for his graduate film I Am Tom Moody (Ainslie would also create prize artwork for the 2018 BAAs). More recently the duo have joined forces again for their upcoming BAFTA funded short film SHACKLE, produced by Anderson and animated/directed by Henderson. 

Multi BAFTA Scotland award-winning, Glasgow based animator Ross Hogg‘s work is defined by distinctly different styles on each film, showcasing a passion toward experimentation frequently seen in filmmakers that hail from a country rich in creativity. Hogg was nominated for a BAA award in 2020 for his short experimental 16mm film 4:3, using physical film stock and paint. 

A prominent part of the region’s animation industry is the illustrious, long-running Edinburgh International Film Festival with its inclusive promotion of Scotland’s film heritage. Animation in particular has been highlighted through the prestigious McLaren Award for best British animation since 1990, overseen for a decade by another key Scottish talent Iain Gardner, the festival’s animation programmer until he stepped down in 2019. Beginning his career as an apprentice at Richard Williams’s studio, Iain’s long history in the industry has made him a fount of knowledge as both a director (whose films include Akbar’s Cheetah for Channel 4 and The Tannery, produced with Axis Animation in Glasgow) and promoter of animated works. Presently heading up Animation Garden, Gardner has since been developing Mustard & Ketchup and A Bear Named Wojtek through the BFI Young Audiences Content Fund; he also contributed a piece of art for the BAA award in 2018.

Scotland’s heritage in both the animation as well as broader cultural industries has provided fruitful soil for multiple studios, both as outposts for established studios such as the aforementioned Axis (which also has studios in Bristol and London) as well as Rockstar North in Edinburgh, part of Rockstar Games based in New York, producers of the well known Grand Theft Auto series. These have been developed alongside other homegrown talents such as Muckle Hen based in Edinburgh, which provides a range of services alongside animation for various commercial content; Eyebolls, also in Edinburgh, is a creative production studio that represents multiple talented individuals who work across film, TV and print; ISO Design in Glasgow produce large-scale, interactive media projects for TV, museums and other creative/heritage institutions; Interference Pattern, founded in 2008 in Edinburgh, have produced Oscar-winning and BAFTA-nominated animated content; and Wild Child Animation, a relative newcomer founded in Stirling by a team of industry veterans in 2020 who collectively boast an impressive array of credits and accolades, enabling them to make a significant splash on the animation scene through their use of mixed-media animation, multiple BAFTA nominated and winning productions and various top-tier clients. On top of the well-known shows and years of experience behind them, Wild Child are nominated for the Best Children’s Series award at this year’s BAAs for their series The Brilliant World of Tom Gates, based on Liz Pichon’s best-selling books, making them an exciting new studio to keep our eyes on.

Wild Child have teamed up with Screen Scotland to host the live stream of the British Animation Awards at Codebase in Stirling on Thursday March 10th. Email bookings@britishanimationawards.com for more info and tickets.

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Robin Robin is the tale of a small bird with a very big heart. After a shaky nativity of her own – her unhatched egg falls out of the nest and into a rubbish dumpster – she comes out of her shell, in more ways than one, and is adopted by a loving family of mice burglars. More beak and feathers than fur, tail and ears, more cluck and klutz than tip-toe and stealth, she is nonetheless beloved by her adopted family, a Dad Mouse and four siblings.

As she grows up, though, her differences make her something of a liability, especially when the family take her on furtive food raids to the houses of the humans (pronounced ‘Who-mans’) in the dead of night.

Neither fully bird, nor fully mouse, Robin embarks on a food heist of her own to prove herself worthy of her family and also, hopefully, to bring them back a Christmas sandwich. Along the way, she encounters a curmudgeonly magpie who has a house full of glittery things that he’s stolen and, as it turns out, an unlikely heart of gold. He has set that heart on stealing the sparkling star from the top of a local who-man family’s Christmas tree. And who better to help him than the eternally optimistic Robin herself. The adventure brings them face-to-terrifying-face with a menacing, yet very cool Cat, who has a warm place for birds and mice alike: her tummy.

Can they survive? Can they bring home the sandwich and the star? And, most of all, can Robin discover, and learn to love, who she really is, delighting her family and earning her wings in the process?

Image via Netflix

Following in the grand tradition of the Aardman holiday short film (albeit for a new streaming generation), the dynamic duo of Please and Ojari, like the rest of us, grew up on the work of the studio and were keen to live up to its stellar reputation by doing “something different,” says Dan. This has led to a whole new look for both the studio and the directors themselves, continuing a long-established strength of story and humour, this time paired with the fuzzier, softer world of needle-felt puppet creation. In total there was a stunning 75 puppets including 20 fluffy mice, 19 hero robin, 11 snarky magpies, 4 purring cats and three ‘who-mans’, but no partridge or pear tree as far as I can see. There were also iterations of puppets that enabled particular performances such as a ‘sneak’ Robin puppets that were ‘more angled’ so “Robin could creep more stealthily like her mouse siblings during food raids,” says Head of Puppet Making Anne King.

In fact, the puppets were made in three different sizes (from A to C scale) for different sets, with ‘A’ scale being the largest at around 19cm in height in the case of Robin, but twice that size in the case of the Cat. These puppets were used in the biggest sets, including the ‘who-man’ kitchen, which was built to a wopping 175% scale “It gave us a vastly outsized set, which was a strange experience after being used to working on miniature sets,” says DOP, Dave Alex Riddett. “It made you feel like a seven-year-old trying to reach the biscuit tin in your mum’s kitchen… and I’m over six feet tall.” Conversely, ‘C’ scale puppets were used on tiny tabletop sets and came in at around 2cms in height in the case of the Robin and Magpie. “Yet the Animators still managed to get loads of character out of those tiny little creatures,” says floor manager, Richard Bowen.

 

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Needle-felt is an incredibly tactile material that has seen a growing uptake in use over the last few years, due to its highly tactile screen presence and its ability to absorb light on set. The highly talented and experienced team at Aardman drew together their broad skillsets to create this beautiful world, calling in an needle-felting experts to aid in the development, as well as a felting machine that uses blocks of needles to expedite the process by creating a layer of felt that was then needled into the surface of the puppet.  Designs started from 2D drawings, then clay sculpture, in turn modelled out of rubber with a rig and a wire armature inside before the rubber was overlaid with foam and then finally with felt. 

The puppets’ eyes, however, present the biggest challenge. Unlike the signature rounded ball eyes of other Aardman productions, Dan and Mikey wanted brow-less eyes that were flat to the face. “Our problem was how to get expression and emotion into those eyes,” says Chief animator Ian Whitlock. “You’ll forgive almost anything else but if the eyes are dead the puppet just doesn’t work.” For this incredibly important design feature, the team created a whole set of different blink shapes. Each eye had ten magnetic pupils and eight different eyelids that could be varied to achieve different emotions and expressions. “We also found out that a lot of expressions can be conveyed through the ears or the position of the head,” Ian says. The cat’s eyes were even made with UV pigment to give a glowing effect.”

However as executive producer Sarah Cox states “In the end, the material you use to animate doesn’t really matter, what matters is the soul of the character you’re able to put into it.” and the soul of this film is that of a soft sweet little outsider adopted into the heart of an unusual family, who finds solace in embracing her differences and how her uniqueness can add value to those around her. With children at its core, this tale of acceptance will doubtless be a festive short that will stand the test of time and be revisited with great anticipation each year. Skwigly recently spoke with directors Dan Ojari and Mikey Please to learn more about bringing this world together.

How long had you been sitting on the idea for Robin Robin and how did it end up in front of the folks at Aardman?

Dan Ojari: From when we sort of like devised the plot and the overall story, it was probably like about three or four years.

Mikey Please: Yeah, a long time. The initial germ of the idea came about in a relatively short amount of time, but then we had many years of orally telling that story to various people. And it wasn’t until we could get to the end of it without that person walking away, that we thought it’s ready to pitch. Then we took it to Annecy and. very luckily. bumped into Sarah Cox in the canteen

DO: Before that we’d put a little story synopsis booklet together, which was a bunch of different ideas that we were developing. We found that it’s a really nice way to clearly communicate an idea or a story. I think we also had a really rough script and some concept art. But we hadn’t gone to Annecy to pitch the idea or anything, we just bumped into her, got chatting and just sort of quite informally started pitching it.

MP: And we got more and more enthusiastic until I think I fully burst into one of the musical numbers in the canteen, kneeling at her feet.

That’s how all good pitches should go.

DO: We’ve found if you do jazz hands at the end of your pitch, the success rate is a lot higher!

Robin Robin (Image courtesy of Netflix)

The use of needlefelt is yet another new material for you both. What did you feel this way of making puppets brought to this world?

DO: I think the the look of the characters is down to a couple of things, firstly the needlefelt technique, which has a real charm and tactile nature to it, and a kind of warmth to the way that it lights, it’s very endearing as material. But then there’s also Matt Forsythe, who is our character designer, and then production designer – we really love the bold shapes that he brought to his characters.

MP: And of course, the Flynn twins, Nathan and Joshua Flynn, who then translated Matt’s drawings into 3D models, and Anne King, the puppet supervisor here at Aardman, so there’s a lot of people who contribute to that design.

 

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What were the challenges of working with such a big team?

MP: There has been a sort of gradient of projects leading up to this, where we’ve worked with progressively larger teams, and this was certainly like, the biggest team we’ve worked with, but I’d say neither of us have made any anything completely on our own, ever. Most animation is a process of collaborating, so that communication skill and being relatively personable and able to take on other people’s ideas and be a crossroads for many different creative people, it’s a skill that sort of gradually grown and hopefully works.

DO: I think if we’d have gone from just making our own films to this, it would have been horrendous. But we’ve been fortunate enough to have, bit by bit, a bit more experience with that. You have to understand what you’re doing, rather than if you’re making your own thing, and you’re figuring it out as you go along, whereas when you’re working with people, your role is to be clear.

MP: Luckily, I think that the Aardman team are so used to creatively-led production. So that kind of R&D and that experimenting phases is sort of built into the production.

DO: Yeah, it was quite satisfying to come to a place that’s very organised around creating something like this.

 

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There’s obviously quite a huge, talented voice cast behind it. Did you always have these specific people in mind for characters, or were they just some really nice surprises along the way?

DO: We started the project with quite a clear plot. The characters weren’t super defined so there was a big process of figuring out who they were and also what was just endearing and funny about them. Richard E. Grant was quite an early reference for Magpie. We still explored lots of different routes of who Magpie might be, but as soon as we tried out the script, reading it like Richard E. Grant, you realise he’s the comic relief of the whole film and in lots of scenes really steals the show. Bronte Carmichael, who plays Robin, her audition really stood out as just really endearing and funny and warm.

MP: Sometimes you can have a really brilliant audio performance when listening to it over headphones, but when you put it next to the physical body of the puppet they’re completely disjointed; you can’t believe that the voice would be physically inside of that visual thing you’re seeing. So with each of the characters, we’re sort of waiting for that moment where the physicality of the puppet and audio nature of the voice sit together. So yeah, there was a moment where we saw Bronte’s video test with the puppet and it was very exciting. “She’s been in our mind for so many years and there she is, for real!”

I saw this morning that there’s a tie-in book, which looks really lovely. Moving forward, what are your plans either with Robin Robin or future work?

MP: It’s a bit too early to say, specifically. But of course, Robin Robin is a world in which we would love to tell other stories, should the opportunities present themselves.

Robin Robin will debut on Netflix November 24th. Hear more from Mikey Please and Dan Ojari in our latest episode of the Skwigly Animation Podcast (stream below or download here)

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The unusual CG incorporates overtly stylised character designs, making the characters uncanny and ill-looking, disproportionate with minuscule waists and ankles and oversized heads, while the painterly-textured UV mapping makes every character look sickly and unreal. This is made even more disturbing by their environments, which alternate between a harshly lit climbing centre, resembling an underground bunker and the eerily half-lit open-plan apartment the central character shares with her partner. The alternative world, by contrast, takes place entirely in an alpine, multi-level house surrounded by lush forest that acts as a barrier to the rest of the world. As the women lose their grasp on both realities and their collective minds, a sense of claustrophia culminates.

The animation itself is a little disjointed in places, with some clearly time-saving measures used that may seem a little jarring at first, but Hye-mi has used these to her advantage. The limited movement of the peripheral characters’ hyper un-natural or even glitching animation could be read as a clever suggestion that nothing in these perceived worlds are real. As well as the artifice of animation as a whole, the use of this rudimental CG language acts as a secondary level of separation between not only the sophisticated eye of the audience but between the characters themselves, most importantly the alternative versions of the central protagonist. What results is a dizzying film that imbues the surrealist tendencies of Korean film with a gothic air, making use of the animated medium to further explore the internal space of the female. As Se-Hyeon is pulled in various directions, first by other people, then by experiences outside of her control before finally, she inevitably turns inwards to take hold of her own wants and desires to take back her physical and mental autonomy. The films make use of a slow, continuously growing sense of dread, which penetrates the audience leaving them feeling unhinged, unwell and unsure of what they are witnessing.

Climbing screens 9pm November 18th at the Genesis cinema as part of the London Korean Film Festival

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Brunch (dir. Marnik Loysen)

The dichotomies and in-fighting within our community are packed deliciously into this short stop-motion film. The bold puppets’ design and level of detail given to the backgrounds create a perfect homage to everything that has come to signify the current popular culture, from the reproduction prints of botanical illustrations to painted industrial brick walls, hacked IKEA furniture, house plants, hashtags and the never-ending options for a bespoke coffee order that infuriate the old, humiliate the young but are ultimately humourous in their utter frivolity when compared to the real issues that orbit and impact us all.

We were lucky enough to catch some time with Marnik as the film begins its festival journey, having premiered this month at 2021 Encounters Film Festival.

Can you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and how you started working in animation?

I went to university in 2015 to study animation, but quickly found that it wasn’t really the right place for me. So, I was looking for ways out and managed to get a job at Aardman on Early Man as an assistant animator and I have been there ever since on all their feature films, TV specials and series. I have also been trying to make my own stuff in the gaps between projects at Aardman. That’s really the aim, to try and find a balance between working on my own stuff and getting paid. Which recently has been a good balance, but we’ll see, it’s always difficult.

Can you describe the idea behind Brunch, was it inspired by a particular event? Or was it a combination of research on the subject?

Brunch is about generational divisions and millennials eating too many avocados. It’s come up in so many discussions over the last few years. Obviously, it kind of began with that Australian billionaire who was talking about how millennials can’t afford homes because they spend all their money on avocados, which then became a meme, both online and in the real world. It just kept coming up and I really thought it was a funny thing, that people were talking about it so much but also that it does have a lot of real-world consequences and interacts with so much of the social discussion that’s happening at the moment. So really, it just came from those conversations and thinking about everything that it connects to. It was originally just a very silly idea but when I actually developed it into film, I started realising that every story that was in the news was linked to this idea of generational division. In the end it ended up being quite difficult, trying to work out what to actually put in, because it could have gone on for hours, developing a script about everything that is being discussed and how it’s linked to.

Brunch (dir. Marnik Loysen)

Can you tell me a little bit about the circumstances that led to the film’s production? Did you get much support, funding-wise?

We were trying to get funding the whole way through. Unfortunately, it never happened. I think it was made harder by not having a great deal of my own past work to show. But it was a good script and I knew we could make something good, but I couldn’t prove that in any way. Also, the producer hadn’t worked on an animated film before, which probably led to the same issue in the funders’ minds. In the end, it was just me and the producer Simon Marriott who self-funded it – which, to be honest, I probably can’t do again. It did give us some great opportunities, because although we were limited by what we could afford, we also didn’t have any other voices or parties we had to consider, so we were really able to make it the way we wanted to make it. I’ve worked with funding bodies before where the film has ended up not being quite what I wanted because there were other voices involved.

I understand that you made this pretty much in the height of the pandemic, how did you have to adapt to keep the project moving forward?

The pandemic was, in a way, a blessing at the start, because I probably wouldn’t have made the film without the furlough in the first lockdown. I know for a lot of people that wasn’t the case and they didn’t have that kind of experience. I had lots of creative energy and really wanted to make stuff, so I got to put it into lots of art. A lot of it was developing this film, writing the script, developing the character work and everything. So that was kind of great because there are not many opportunities in your life where you have the time to actually do that, to sit back and let it happen. But then when it came to the actual production it was almost a bit of a nightmare because, two days before I was going to move everything into the studio, we went into the January lockdown. So I thought it was just dead. I thought “that’s it, we’re not going to be able to make it”. In reality, it just came down to a bit more organisation. The crew were absolutely amazing, which is what made it work.

Image via Marnik Loysen

We just decided that only people who had to go into the studio would go into the studio, by avoiding people and working from home and then delivering stuff to each other when needed. Daniel Morgan, who was the cinematographer, managed to do all his work via zoom. I would share my screen with him and between the live feed from the camera, the webcam from the computer (which would allow him to see me on set), my phone on a tripod looking down at the set from above and another camera if we had one available, he would have a bunch of different angles of the set. And he could just instruct me on where to put the lights. We’d work it out together like that, which I thought was a bit disappointing, but turned out to be absolutely great. He was amazing. So yeah, I couldn’t be happier with the end result.

As with most short films, it’s a real labour of love and often members of the crew wear many hats. As writer/director how involved were you with the puppets and the animation?

Ellie Palmer, an amazing puppet maker at Aardman, helped out with the puppets. All of the designs and everything that’s sculpted was done by me. She worked from the designs and blueprints – so the moulding, casting, paintwork and the fabric work, that kind of thing. The puppets ended up looking so amazing and I’m so thankful. And the animation was all me. I would have liked to hire an animator if I could afford it but I had to do it myself.

Image via Marnik Loysen

The style of the characters is very bold and very impactful. They’re also quite unique. I don’t think I’ve seen characters that are like them anywhere. What was your process for developing the look of the film?

Thank you, I’m very glad you think that about the design. I think it’s always really important to me. Particularly with this, it was so involved with the idea and the look of it from the very beginning, it had to in essence look sort of like a hipster’s ultimate dream, but then turned up to 11, a little bit further, until it gets a bit wonky and a bit weird. So all of the colours and everything that fills the frames led to that, essentially. Like with any design work, there were just lots of iterations and workings, trying extreme things and seeing what worked and then seeing like a version further until they go too far. And making sure that everything was kind of designed from the same point of view, so it all fits together on the screen.

It kind of reminds me of a comment I saw on Twitter in which someone was complaining that all animation looked a particular way – they didn’t like this particular thin-lined, modern, very flat 2D aesthetic that is currently dominating commercials, such as Robert Strange’s Mini Cheddars – Cheddar Town series. Brunch kind of looks like a 3D version of that, but that argument of “I’m so sick of everything looking a certain way” I can’t really get behind.

The style you’re describing was literally one of the main starting points in my mind. It was just a case of working out “how do you do that in stop motion?” – because, obviously, there are limitations. You can’t just do exactly the same thing. But it all came from a bunch of designs, I did have certain shots that had a really specific looked to them. But I would keep asking myself how I can push it to its extreme, make it look like a piece of 2D artwork. Also, lots of the inspiration came from children’s illustrations and graphic novels as much as possible, really contemporary stuff. The idea is really meant to fit into that world of what’s happening in the main characters, basically.

Image via Marnik Loysen

I like animation that really comes from an illustration position. One of my favourite things in the film were the credits, which is not to say I don’t really like the rest of the film. I just haven’t seen really nice end credits for a long time, that aren’t just black or white but something different that sort of ties the whole film together.

It’s like what I was saying earlier about the idea of millennials and the generational divides. Once you start thinking about it, you can work out how to make everything apply to that. So even in the credits and bits of artwork hung up in the background, it is all connected to that. I’m lucky to have found an idea like that, that really didn’t require too much thought because it all just fit together really nicely and easily.

I find it interesting because the film also has a very art school aesthetic, which is interesting – especially as you didn’t go down that route yourself in the end. I feel like this film is what you probably would have wanted to aim for if you’d gone through with a degree. So you’ve kind of done that but also kickstarted your career as well, which is ideal really.

Yeah, totally. Literally, out of all the other things I’ve made prior to this, this is the first one that’s kind of ended up being what it was meant to be, you know and there’s some ineffable quality that I can see, that I wanted for all of my work from the start, but this is the only one that’s actually got it. So yes, it’s very gratifying to get to that point.

Image via Marnik Loysen

I think especially in the UK, it’s a very unique thing to have been able to make a film that hasn’t gone through one of the big art schools but still ended up as a really strong piece. I think that comes from you being very talented of course, but also having the contacts that you need to bring that together and just being a very affable person as well, which is how you would hope more short films were being made. But it’s a very, very tricky industry in that sense, that often everything has to come together into a perfect storm.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And also, you know, it’s fair to say that so much of it does come down to money, which is a really sad thing to say. But part of the reason why this film worked is that I could find great people to work on it, who I knew would be brilliant. And they all had the same perspective that I did and knew what I was going for. Obviously, I don’t know how to light things that well, and I don’t know how to do sound that well. I know the basics of those things but it’s never going to end up looking really polished, as you said, unless you can afford to pay people to do it. Unfortunately, that’s kind of the sad truth about it.

The film has basically only just been completed and is about to go into encounters. Do you have any plans for some now that it’s out there? And has it gotten too many more festivals that you are particularly excited about?

Encounters is the world premiere. So that’s the first one. It’s been sent off to lots of places I can’t talk about anything else yet. So, we’ll see. I’m really hoping that it’s going to get a good reception and get into lots of places because after you’ve put that much work in, you really want lots of people to see it. I really do believe that film festivals are the right setting to watch those kinds of films, with no idea what to expect. It just pops up. And I think that’s the way to enjoy it.

Encounters passholders can see Brunch as part of The Body Politic and Comedy 2 programmes until the end of the month
See more of the work of Marnik Loyson at marnikloyson.com

The post Interview with ‘Brunch’ director Marnik Loysen appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

Along with his blend of new and old technology, the rather unusual claim to Christmassy subject matter made him the ideal fit for the first stop-motion Christmas episode for Netflix’s animated sci-fi anthology series Love Death + Robots, the brainchild of American director Tim Miller. We took this opportunity to talk to Dear, to discuss his humble origins, to work on a range of project scales, his thoughts on bringing different modes of production together and what value this has brought to both him as a director and to the audience at home. 

(Image courtesy of BlinkInk)

Could you tell me a little bit about how you started in animation?

I’ve been making films since I was about 12, through making models, painting and being in the family shed using tools. My parents also saved up for a PC when I was 15. It was quite low spec, but it could run Corel Draw and a very early version of flash, which is now essentially animate in the Adobe Suite. I did a lot of stuff in that – bearing in mind there was no YouTube, there were no online tutorials. It was just kind of pressing buttons until it does the thing you want it to do which takes you fifty times as long because you don’t know the shortcut keys. It was just really fun. I actually wanted to go into special effects and animatronics. I wanted to be a model maker, that was my plan, but I couldn’t find a course that would do it. So, I went for illustration, it’s such a good broad base for any visual pursuit, in terms of colour, tone, composition, storytelling and life drawing, not that I was any good at that. In fact, I dismally failed my life drawing module but it’s fine, I always just own up and say I can’t draw people very well.

So, I did illustration but was always drawn to moving images. I ended up teaching myself After Effects. Again, we’re still pre-YouTube tutorials. Which was a very long-winded way of doing things, I didn’t even discover that ease function for a long time. So, I was doing it frame by frame, like you would in stop motion, it was really impractical, but I learned loads.  When I left university, I got a job as a junior compositor at Arthur Cox which was great. It was the fastest learning I’ve ever, I learned from some really good senior compositors. University is great as you have luxurious amounts of time but there’s nothing like getting in the studio and working for someone else to teach you really, really quick. I was doing commercial work as an After Effects composer and then by night or over weekends I was directing music videos, but for like a hundred quid, it was essentially an excuse to try out new processes or tools. Any ideas I had, I want to put them into something, it was more about the experience. I started to get my work seen as a director, I was showing people my reels or getting up on the internet. YouTube was a thing by this point, I’m pleased to say and it kind of went from there. I ended up in London, a friend said there was a job going at an ad agency, then someone else saw my reel, then Blink spotted it and eventually signed me as a director where I am today.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I never really thought I’d be an animation director. I was lucky enough to get onto the set of Fantastic Mr Fox when I was 24 as an intern for a few weeks. It was amazing, they were very welcoming, and I got to meet lots of people there. By the end of it, I just wanted to do all of it. I wanted to be in control of all of it. I thought it was fantastic. I still feel very grateful for the experience and all the people that I got to work with. I just wanted to oversee all of it because I’m a bit of a control freak. I like that. I’m an animation director, I can control everything. It’s not even like being a live-action director where there’s the possibility for happy accidents. There’s none of those in animation. It’s all in my control,

That’s great. So, you’ve forged quite a reputation for your use of innovative techniques with different kinds of production and performance to tell, phenomenal stories, but can you tell me what draws you to this mixed media approach to your work? And what do you feel it brings to the audience both emotionally and visually?

It’s an interesting conversation to have. I’ll be wandering around the house asking myself the same question because I also think why? Is it selfish? Is it just because I want to do it? It’s a few things, really, I was looking at some comments on Instagram that somebody left on one of the love death and robots clips and it’s the same question that I get a lot of the time, which is, why bother doing it in stop motion when you can achieve the same quality in CG? Which was one of maybe 500 comments most of which are saying  ‘wow! it was stop motion?’. I don’t know what value that has exactly, but it seems to strike a chord with people, it’s tangible. I like objects with stories, that people have had their hands on. I don’t want to say there’s imperfection, because some of the artists that we work with are making their work look perfect, but it’s got a life beyond the screen. There are these artefacts of the film, with imperfection and human error, which is a great thing. I find it easier to connect, I like practical effects, I like knowing that there were people behind the scenes with their hands-on stuff.

Even in the beginning, I would animate on the computer but still make things in the shed. There is of course software for digital painting with digital brushes that look fantastic, and you could say to an oil painter, why would you bother? But they like the feel of the medium, they understand it, how it moves and how it works. I’ve done CG jobs, I’ve done full 2D jobs and I’m always impressed with the artists involved. I’m always fascinated with how it works. But I love being in a studio. My dad’s a carpenter, very wise, he’s just retired. So, I’m used to being in a shed with things being made all the time, I would go to work with him when I was a teenager. It’s an environment I like, I like being on a film set, which is kind of like a building site. Not quite as wild but there are wires, there’s scaffolding, there are people overhead, pulling up, changing things. I really like the energy of that environment. I like working with carpenters, painters, people that work with their hands and watching them make things it’s a real treat for me.

That’s not to say that people that work in CG aren’t – it’s an incredible craft, and it’s the same deal. It’s that level of detail going into it. I like being in that space. I like that being the way I spend my day. And it’s a fascinating place to be and I think that comes through in the work. There’s definitely a place for stop motion. There are definitely projects where it’s not suitable, a lot of the time I get jobs to come in, might be an advert or music video and people say we want to do stop-motion, but I think it should be done on the computer honestly. You don’t need it to be in stop motion. It’s not really an appropriate way of telling this story. I think it’s got to be used for the right reasons. I don’t like the idea of old ways dying out. I think keeping the tradition alive is good – just because there are new ways of doing things, doesn’t mean that you need to shut out the old ones.

Are there any other kind of considerations you have when you’re looking at a potentially new way of working when pitching?

You’ve already identified that I’m not a purist some people believe there shouldn’t be a lot of technologies. I remember when I worked on Fantastic Mr Fox, that was one of the things I found really interesting. An animator called Dan Gill, who actually ended up being one of our lead animators on ‘All through the House’, he’s fantastic. On Fantastic Mr Fox, it was his job to come up with the practical in-camera special effects, such as when the characters were being electrocuted when they go over a fence, these are things you could do in aftereffects or CG really easily. But Wes Anderson wanted solutions that happened in camera. I guess he wanted that kind of 1970s stop motion feel to it. Hence, smoking clouds and explosions made of fluff which looks great, it looks tangible. It looks like stop motion. What’s interesting, is that the reason they were done like that in the first place, would have been because that’s the only way they could do it. If you had given them a computer they probably would have done it that way instead. A lot of people working in practical effects would have loved the option to make something that looked more realistic. So, when people use practical in-camera effects now it’s because they like the aesthetic. It harks back to a time gone by and there’s some romance in that, a sense of nostalgia because it looks charming. It’s lovely, it’s not flashy, it’s quite a humble way to do things. I think that’s the reason for using stop motion a lot of the time.

(Image courtesy of BlinkInk)

I’m not a purist, there are elements of stop-motion that I really appreciate, like the tangibility, the being on set working with animators who work with their hands. I think there’s a lot that comes through in the final footage, that whether you know about filmmaking or animation or not, you appreciate as a viewer, there’s just a quantity to the footage, which is hard to emulate. At the same time, people can and should do whatever they like. But if there’s a bit of fire or mist from breath because it’s cold, I’m more than happy to do that in CG. For example, the monster in ‘All Through the House’ has drool that comes out when he opens his mouth, to that in-camera would have tripled the length of the shoot. The CG team in Norway did an incredible job of making it look real and they put it on twos wherever is necessary. I’m all for that. I think that’s fantastic and enchanting. But at the very base of the footage, it is stop motion. So, it’s still got that heart, stop-motion is the foundation of the footage but then it’s augmented with other things, which makes it more believable, which makes for a better viewing experience. Again, it’s not the best way of doing it, it’s our way of doing it. I think it’s just trying to naturally find that balance. Where do I stop and just make it on the computer? When does the stop motion part become pointless?  Where did I start wasting everyone’s time? So, it’s just making sure that I’m, keep asking myself that question.

I think when you’re building a world, it’s about creating those rules and which roles you’re going to apply to different things, is everything going to be stop motion? Or are you going to have elemental things that wouldn’t be tangible and real life, are those going to be digital? it’s all rules and preferences as a  Director. It’s your choice to decipher that line.

I think there are absolutely rules to the way that I do things, but they do change. It depends on what it is, for ‘All through the House’  it’s set in a house. We didn’t need any digital set extension; we didn’t need to be doing big digital matt painting for the sky or CG city on the horizon. So, it’s just picking the right tools for the job.

When you are bringing all of these various elements into production, does that affect your control as a director? when you don’t necessarily have that specific skill set, how does that alter your control over the production?

I just make sure that I learn about it as quickly as possible. Again, going back to what I said about learning on the job being the fastest way to possibly learn. I’ll ask a lot of questions, do a lot of research. I would never walk into a CG studio and say I understand all of this. If I don’t understand I will ask and try to have some humility and ask them to explain bits to me or ask how does this work? And more often than not, people are perfectly happy to give me a bit of a brief on what’s going on. But working in commercials jobs can be quite short. Again, like when I was starting out making music videos, I could try out a bit of kit or try a new technique. When we do a commercial, we may go, alright, how about stop motion with CG faces because that will be really good, and work it out on that short job. Then that’s another string to your bow, you get control back when you keep learning. It does mean that you have to work with a team that is willing to bear with you a little bit.

This constant need for re-skilling is a big part of filmmaking especially in animation because there’s just so many possible pipelines and ways to do things?

Absolutely, it’s a tricky one with the CG work, I know if I said, I’m not going to learn anything about CG, just make it work, it would still get done, but probably not as well, because I wouldn’t have the vocabulary to have those discussions and the person doing the CG would have a terrible time. It would be such a chore, to have to work with somebody who didn’t know what they were talking about, I think. You see that loads, people refusing to learn. When people ask for animation in advertising, they’ll say, we want this, but they don’t want to know how animation works and it would really help if you did, because then when they ask questions, they would know the answer is we need more time or, even that it can’t be done. I think it’s important for that reason, you just don’t want people you’re working with to be having a terrible time. So, it’s worth trying to learn as much as possible so that you have that vocabulary.

I always think it comes down to respect really.

Yeah, it absolutely does. Also, the skill in this industry is unbelievably high, you can’t help have respect. But you know, having the title Director, for some people I think it makes them feel like they’re at the top of the pile and whilst there is a lot of responsibility, you have to acknowledge that you can’t do it on your own. I tried for years, that’s what I did all through my 20s, made stuff on my own, and you just need other people if you want stuff to be that much better, that much bigger and have to recognise that. Which keeps you levelheaded and on the same level as the entire team.

For Love, Death and Robots, which was really beautiful. It was the first use of practical puppets in that series. How were you first approach to work on the project? And what was the experience like?

The job came in for blink industries, they had seen the ‘The Supporting Act’ at an expo or showcase in LA and traced it back to us. It was the first project we used CG face tracked on to stop-motion puppets successfully, which at the time I was a bit of Hail Mary, but it worked, which showed us the potential for that technique. So, we pitched on the jobs in the same way we do for commercials. We spoke to Tim Miller and Jennifer Yu Nelson, about the process. Tim runs a CG studio, amongst other things, and fully embraces technology. They are at the top of their game with what that they do. He wanted to make sure that this wasn’t just going to be a novelty film in the anthology, it needed to still be cutting edge and fit in with the rest of the films. He didn’t want in-camera practical effects, he wanted it to feel slick, but for it to still look like a stop motion film. We were quite a good choice because we could get that hybrid look.

We put together a really good pitch document, which I was really pleased with. It was super intense but a really good learning experience. I’ve been making commercials for over 10 years now, so had become accustomed to having a certain level of authority in my work. But suddenly I was bottom of the pile again, I’m working with Tim Miller and Jennifer Yu Nelson, incredibly successful feature directors who I really respected. We did an initial storyboard and added loads of ideas to the script because, in advertising, there’s usually an unspoken invitation to make changes, which is almost always necessary. I chucked things in, took out lines of dialogue, and gave them this animatic. They were alarmed about the quality of the animatic, it was one of the best animatics that I’d had to work from, but these are people that work in Hollywood. They are used to banks of people at desks doing storyboards, on staff in their studio. Whilst our borders work for us for a week then there often gone on to another job. I don’t normally require that, I’ve gotten things done with a lot less, even no storyboards, they understandably wanted changes. We were also not allowed to change the script, Tim spends a long time working on those scripts and the stories are very close to him. It was a very different industry almost a different world. I think half the job was actually showing them that they could trust us. I was learning so much from them because there so experienced and talented.

What was the biggest challenge in the project?

The creature design was one of them. I worked more directly with Jennifer, Tim being as busy as he was, but there was a point where we had a creature design that we’ve been working on for weeks and weeks. It was signed off and sculpt double who had started to build it. Then I got an email saying Tim’s not happy with the monster, he doesn’t feel like it’s frightening enough and doesn’t look enough like a predator. So not only did we have to stop, but also find the money for the re-design, what actually happened was, I ended up doing the creature design. I put a questionnaire together for Tim with things like; do you like the claws on this? Do you like the teeth of this? with loads of reference images and he also sent a lot of great references. Eventually, we got to what he wanted which was loads of fun. I think the biggest challenge was just how big and professional they are in regarding the standards they were looking for – Hollywood quality animation and whilst I’m confident in both my and the people I work with skills, it is still daunting. We also had about half the budget we would normally have for a commercial for the length. We really had to be resourceful, there were points on set where we tried to get two story beats into one shot rather than two, to consolidate shots and lighting setups -that’s how tight it was.

When you work in stop motion, it can take days to set up a shot. When you’ve only hired out the studio for four weeks, there’s no dilly-dallying. These are the things people don’t realize when they watch the film. We had a performer who did all the acting for both the kids so that the animators had references to work from, but when we got on set, we only had like four hours to get the shot, so we would try and get the shot in 75 frames instead of 150 frames. So, I’d be working with the animator shooting stuff on a phone, trying to get that performance down, I’d be running around in the car park or hiding behind the sofa, trying to see if I could get that performance down into a shorter time. Which was possible a lot of the time, it was just tough to shoot it 50 times stick it in the edit, time remap it and go alright, there’s your reference. We were putting out loads of fires on set, not literally, of course, there was a lot of problem-solving but if you didn’t directly ask me, I would have forgotten how tough it was because it was so much fun. And because of what we got out of it. I feel it came out really, really well.

That’s one of the nice things about stop-motion, it really is a medium that calls for great problem-solving and if you have that kind of mind where you really enjoy problem-solving, then stop motion is the medium for you.

It’s quite intoxicating, actually solving those problems. I think being on set having a deadline, having all those great minds together. It’s just really exhilarating. Working with the people that you get to work with and that kind of collaborative problem solving, when you nail it or solve it, and then it gets signed off, you think that was probably better than if it had gone smoothly. Having challenges, just get your brain working if nothing else it’s good exercise, good brain exercise.

How do you feel your film sits within the rest of the series?

I mean, it’s much shorter. Which makes it different. I’m never going to be able to really answer that objectively or watch it objectively, that partly why I like to read comment sections, and partly because it’s nice to see that people are enjoying it, it’s quite entertaining. Most of the comments from people are that the whole series is too short, there are eight episodes. I think people have forgotten that they were being made during the pandemic, there’s so much work involved and you can’t make it in the same room as anyone but you know I think it does sit well with the others in the series-people do assume it is CG. I think as a Christmas film within the anthology, there’s a legacy between stop-motion and Christmas specials. Which we kind of hinted at in the film, which perhaps makes the use of stop motion make more sense. So even if people did find it jarring for that reason, it would be for a good reason. The fact that it got signed off and Tim and Jennifer were really pleased with it tell me that it did the trick.

As you mentioned earlier, the puppet faces are CG composited. What does the use of digitalized mouths on the real puppets offer you as a director?

Nuance, I think anyone who works in stop motion will know that puppets have their limits and I think lots of people embrace that. Depending on the design choices that you make, it doesn’t always matter. Especially if movements are allowed to be bigger, more stylized, and cartoony. Aesthetically, what I like is just shy of realistic. Stop motion puppets that have dots for eyes and mouth shapes that snap into place are obviously going to work perfectly in camera but I’m yet to see a puppet that has a mechanism that can do the things that  I wanted them to do. 3D printing is interesting and everyone’s entitled to make things the way they want, like doing it in-camera if they want. To me, it seems like quite a complicated process. You work in CG, you print out a lot of faces, then you put them on the puppets, but then the jobs not finished because then you need to paint out the seams before it ends up back on the computer again. We couldn’t have afforded to do that if we wanted to. Also, there is still an element of stylization in the movement because those face shapes are going to snap a little bit, from one to another, there are going to be texture variations. LAIKA obviously do incredible work with their cleanup, it’s very finely tuned. But what I want is even smaller, really little facial expressions and things because that’s the types of performances that I like and it’s not until you get on the computer and you start moving things around in CG and the difference between the eyelid being moved is a fraction but changes the whole expression.

You can go from uncanny to charming, or the movement of eyebrows can be worried or not, through these tiny, tiny little movements. I would say it’s about control, I love the control. We had good reference footage. I was doing some facial expressions videos for the guys. The animators onset and stop motion animators had what they needed in terms of body language and performance, and they had the footage with expressions to let them know the intention of the shot that they were going to make. Obviously, they didn’t have any control over the face, except the eyes, which they could get a pin in them and move them which helped them with performance.

Was that the same for The Supporting Act film?

No, they were completely locked masks. The faces were blank, and the eyes couldn’t go anywhere. So that one difference with ‘All Through the House’ the animators had, eyeline’s to work with, it just meant that afterwards, I could absolutely fine-tune those facial expressions. It really was fine, I would get shot back from Storyline in Oslo and I would take a screengrab of it run it through Photoshop and use liquify. Then I could move things around – move eyelids up, nudge, just tiny little, minuscule things with the eyes and eyebrows mostly and then they would fix it in CG. Again, people don’t see this part, it really is such a layered process in order to get that believability and not fall into the uncanny. I look at the work of Disney and Pixar and all you’ve got to do is watch the facial animation in their movies, and you think that’s what we need, for that emotional connection. That nuance and detail.

Were you aware of any kind of like feelings in terms of the division of labour between the animators working on set with the real puppets and the animators behind the computer in regard to performance and how that changed their ability to perform?

If there was, they never expressed it. We had the same guys, Stan, and Andy, on the BBC job. They understood how it worked. It does make their job a lot quicker when they don’t have to do the faces. I don’t think they were concerned over any kind of ownership over the performance, they seemed excited to see the CG go into it. It made it a lot quicker, they were able to focus on the body language, there’s still loads of detail and nuance in those performances. So, they had more time to dedicate to that and because we also had specific live-action references too. They had a lot of work to do as they weren’t super-stylized movements that you could perhaps use shortcuts with, with the live-action video references it really needed to be right. I think the CG team in Norway also enjoyed it. I think again, on the one side you don’t have full control over a character. But on the other side, you only have to concentrate on one aspect of the character and maybe that’s nice, I don’t know. But they seem to enjoy themselves. They were very pleased with the results. It made the whole process better for me, it did just mean that I had to keep everything in my head, if I had dropped the ball and the communication wasn’t there the whole thing wouldn’t fit together, between the two processes. It could have gone really wrong, I think.

Love Death + Robots: All Through the House (dir. Elliot Dear, image courtesy of BlinkInk)

You have such a diverse range of talents. You’ve worked with live-action, CG, 2D and Stop-motion, and often combine them all to such a high quality. Is there anything you’re particularly excited about trying out next?

No, not anymore. I think there was a point where I wanted to try out everything. So I’d try it out for a music video or on this commercial. I feel I’ve gotten to the bottom of a lot of the things that I was wondering about, like the CG faces. I imagined there will be other things that come up eventually, but I’m not going to say I’ve done everything in animation now. I’ve just worked on such a variety of things which has allowed me to build my knowledge and skills in various areas. What I’m able to do now is to respond well, to a brief, I won’t say every brief.

Now we use the right tools for the job, it might be to get that stop motion feel, that tangibility, that nostalgia – that you get from a Rankin Bass Christmas special. But we still want the faces to be really detailed so we will combine these things and put them together. I think I’m better at responding to briefs now and able to do the people want, rather than kind of shoehorning in a process because I wanted to try it out. I feel like as I get older and more experienced, there’s less of that. Now it’s more about what do you need? What does this project need? What does this story require? In order for it to be told in the best possible way. So, I think that’s how I work now.

You can find out more about Eliots Dear’s other work on his directorial page at BLINKINK here. Or follow him on Twitter or Instagram. You can also watch the interview as part of our animation one-to-ones here  or listen below:

The post Interview with Elliot Dear, director of ‘Love Death + Robots: All Through the House’ appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

When misunderstood creative Katie Mitchell gears up to leave home to study film at her dream school, an ongoing conflict with her father leads to a misguided family trip that is brought to a halt when a robotic uprising throws the family – and indeed the world – into a potential apocalypse. Highlighting our ultimate dependency on technology, the human race is quickly captured and imprisoned, owing to our perceived faults as a species and, ultimately, our lack of gratitude toward the devices that literally run our lives for us. Through a fluke of happenstance, the idiosyncratic Mitchell family find themselves becoming the last hope for the future of humankind and must learn to work together to rescue the human race. 

The film boasts an impressive cast, including Oscar winning actress Olivia Colman as the downtrodden AI interface Pal that, after being cast aside for her inventor’s latest update, takes it upon herself to rally everyone’s devices and begin a robotic Armageddon. It hammers home that we really should read those T&Cs, shouldn’t we?

The film shows how taking someone for granted and a simple misunderstanding can cause a potentially catastrophic rift between friends and family, while at its heart is about a father-daughter relationship under strain as the duo struggle to meet eye-to-eye on the small things because they are too focused on the differences that separate them, rather than the similarities that ultimately bond them and the rest of their family together. 

Full of self-deprecating dialogue, knowing nods to the creative process and pitch-perfect humour, the comedy and warmth of the well-developed characters in the film keeps going throughout, with the family’s lovable boss-eyed bread/pig/dog Mochi offering maximum laughs. The story manages to simultaneously mock, condemn and promote the propagation of technology in our lives; as one of the most prominent components of modern living, technology continues to divide the generations, and The Mitchells vs. The Machines succeeds in exploring all the contradictory issues with the continued development of tech in our lives, while reaching a solid conclusion that is neither preachy or overly predictable.

Visually the film combines the high-energy movement of Tartakovsky’s Hotel Transylvania and the painterly, concept-art-come-to-life look of Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse albeit pushed further, largely owing to the incredible artistry of  production design and character designer Lindsey Olivares that inspired the team to take  incredible care in highlighting every wobbly line and imperfectly-perfect quirks in her designs, mirroring the beautifully flawed characters they portray.

Warmth of heart, great gags and a truly enjoyable story combined with a high-impact design style that is able to bring together CGI, illustrative texture, 2D graphics, app-like filters, stickers and even live-action meme culture (mimicking the fast paced nature of the online generation), The Mitchells vs. The Machines is a reflective film that sits right in the center of the current day reflective nature of the post-digital era, in which all aspects of our digital lives are called into question. Although the isolated memes and references could potentially become dated quickly, its core message will remain poignant through the ages.

The Mitchells vs The Machines is available on Netflix now. You can watch our interview with director Mike Rianda below (podcast version can be downloaded here):

The post ‘The Mitchells vs. The Machines’ Review & Director Interview appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.