{"id":11053,"date":"2013-11-07T00:51:05","date_gmt":"2013-11-07T00:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/?p=11053"},"modified":"2019-08-09T21:36:40","modified_gmt":"2019-08-09T21:36:40","slug":"atangledtale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/atangledtale\/","title":{"rendered":"Corrie Francis Parks on ‘A Tangled Tale’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Montana-based Corrie Francis Parks<\/a> has been working as a freelance animator, independent director and photographer for over a decade. With a background in traditional animation and fine art, she eventually discovered an affinity with the process of sand animation and the ways it can be combined with modern, digital processes. Her latest short <\/em>A Tangled Tale<\/a>, in which two fish find themselves entwined against their will, is a charming tale of duality and interdependence that came to be after a successful Kickstarter campaign<\/a> in 2011. Following a highly successful festival run including screenings at Annecy and Hamburg, the short has been released online in full<\/a> to mark the two year anniversary of reaching her Kickstarter goal. Skwigly caught up with Corrie to discuss the production of her first crowdfunded venture.<\/em><\/p>\n

Crowdfunding seems to be far more prevalent nowadays. From your perspective has the public’s attitude toward Kickstarter changed much in the last two years?<\/strong>
\nI definitely agree it has become ubiquitous now. Two years ago when I was doing it, the majority of the people I had sent it to \u2013 parents, friends, my Grandmother, even just people of the older generation encountering it for the first time – I had to explain it to. Now my Mom is like \u201cOh yeah, I\u2019ve seen so many Kickstarter projects recently\u201d, she knows all about it! So I think that it has become a very recognised form, it\u2019s been written up by every major newspaper and whatnot.
\n“I get at least one or two pleas for Kickstarter support every week. I feel lucky because I think that I did it at the right time, just as it was ramping up and becoming this really cool thing. I think if I did another Kickstarter now I would have to approach it very differently because there is an overload of projects. Now<\/i> the challenge is how to make yours stand out as something that you want people to support you on, where people will jump on board. You can\u2019t support every Kickstarter that comes into your inbox anymore, so you have to be a lot more selective and choosy and look at it like \u201cWell, what am I gonna get out of this? Is this a project I really believe in?\u201d before you click that \u2018back\u2019 button.<\/p>\n

When did you get into sand animation and how long have you been working in it?
\n<\/strong>I made my first sand film in 2003, that was in grad school, really just as an exercise in this experimental animation class. I really gravitated toward the techniques and I like working in it but we were shooting everything in 16mm at the time, so there\u2019s a lot of limitations when you don\u2019t have digital fanciness to apply to it. At that point I\u2019d made this little film called Tracks<\/em><\/a> and figured out how to add some neat colour with theater gels to do something different with the sand. I was really pleased with it but told myself I\u2019d never work using this technique again, it\u2019s so much work and it all looked the same and I was more interested in drawing. I didn\u2019t get back to it until 2007 when I had a commission for a Disney theme park where they wanted some sand animation. At that point I was shooting everything digitally and realised there was so much I can do with it now that I had digital frames and could composite stuff, change colours, add different backgrounds, do awesome camera movements and things like that. So that\u2019s when I really started to make it my technique, and I\u2019ve made a couple little commercial projects with it and another short film before A Tangled Tale<\/i>. I\u2019m really pleased with the results.<\/p>\n

\"ATTpaint\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

The combination of digital and traditional processes is used to quite impressive effect. Were the backgrounds themselves hand-painted?
\n<\/strong>Yeah, it was a combination of hand-painted watercolour elements, which I then layered together with some live-action footage of paint flowing down glass. My whole goal was to create this underwater environment that had some depth but that blended really well with the sand texture and didn\u2019t necessarily look composited in. The whole point of the film was that I didn\u2019t want it to be obvious – what\u2019s composited, what\u2019s done on separate layers – I wanted it to be one entire world. So I used a variety of those elements and then also had some sand layers in there to add more of that murky, underwater texture where the plants were all animated separately as well. So squishing all of that in with After Effects took a lot of tweaking to get just right, and then also adding the fish animation and keeping the colour of the fish from getting lost in the background. One of the things that I really like about the technique that I\u2019m developing is this hand-tinting aspect, where I shoot all of the frames in black and white, then take each individual frame and actually hand-tint it in Photoshop with a watercolour brush. That I think really adds this vibrance to the sand that you can\u2019t get any other way.<\/p>\n