{"id":23503,"date":"2015-11-24T04:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-11-24T04:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/?p=23503"},"modified":"2015-11-22T14:04:57","modified_gmt":"2015-11-22T14:04:57","slug":"howie-shia-bam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/howie-shia-bam\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&#038;A with Howie Shia (&#8216;BAM&#8217;)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>Toronto-based Howie Shia&#8217;s work as an animator, illustrator and director has seen him creatively involved with clients including Disney, Nike and Freemantle. A co-founder of production company <a href=\"http:\/\/ppfhouse.com\" target=\"_blank\">PPF House<\/a> alongside his brothers Tim and Leo, Howie has also channeled his creative energies into a series of personal films. His fourth animated short produced with the National Film Board of Canada is <\/strong><\/em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/bam\" target=\"_blank\">BAM<\/a><\/strong><em><strong>, following on from <\/strong><\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/ice_ages\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Ice Ages<\/strong><\/a><em><strong> (produced as part of the NFB&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/hothouse10-chris-landreth\/\" target=\"_blank\">Hothouse apprenticeship scheme<\/a>) <\/strong><\/em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/flutter_en\" target=\"_blank\">Flutter<\/a><\/strong><em><strong> and <\/strong><\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/peggy_baker_four_phrases\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>P<\/strong><strong>eggy Baker: <\/strong><strong>Four Phrases<\/strong><\/a><em><strong>. The film takes the audience on a journey of the life of a studious and introverted boxer who fights an ongoing battle with his own psychological demons and propensity toward bouts of violent rage. W<\/strong><\/em><em><strong>ith festival screenings including the <a href=\"http:\/\/tiff.net\/festivals\/festival15\/shortcuts\/bam\" target=\"_blank\">Toronto International Film Festival<\/a> at which it premiered and the upcoming\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cinematheque.qc.ca\/fr\/programmation\/projections\/film\/bam?pid=20881\" target=\"_blank\">Sommets du cin\u00e9ma d\u2019animation<\/a> in Montreal, Skwigly were keen to learn more about this thoughtful, arresting and extremely well-designed new film.<\/strong><\/em><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/bam\/trailer\/bam_trailer2\/embed\/player\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<strong>For the production of\u00a0<em>Ice Ages<\/em> you were involved in one of the earliest editions of the NFB\u2019s Hothouse apprenticeship scheme. Was it this involvement that began your association with the Film Board?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>My first experiences with the NFB were actually with the Toronto documentary studio. A couple of years prior to my applying to Hothouse, I had received a grant from their Filmmaker\u2019s Assistance Program to help finish a short experimental doc I was making about Antonin Artaud. That led to my meeting then-NFB-producer Karen King, who gave me an internship on a documentary feature called <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/film_club\" target=\"_blank\">Film Club<\/a><\/em>, by Cyrus Sundar Singh, and a few other odd jobs both on set and in the office. I found out about Hothouse during that time and applied and was unexpectedly accepted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Were there other major benefits to your involvement in Hothouse, from a creative\/artistic standpoint?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There were two major ones that I can think of. Firstly, I learned how to animate. Hahaha. Seriously, I had worked primarily as an illustrator and a video artist prior to Hothouse. I had done some very crude animation in a number of my videos but I had never actually learned how to animate. And then suddenly I\u2019m in a studio full of some of the world\u2019s greatest animators. I learned about everything from squash and stretch to how to use After Effects.<br \/>\nSecondly, being at the NFB animation studio in Montreal, you really get to see animation happening in all its various forms\u2014from cel animation, to cut-out, to stop-motion, CG, stereoscopic sky-drawing (google \u201cSANDEE\u201d), scratching on film, painting on glass\u2026 one of the other Hothousers, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/explore-all-directors\/megann-reid\/\" target=\"_blank\">Megann Reid<\/a>, was animating with honey\u2014who knew you could animate with honey? And while that\u2019s all fancy and fun in and of itself, there\u2019s actually, I think, a larger lesson to learn, which is this: I think a lot of people\u2014myself included at that time\u2014think of animation as an aesthetic or a set of aesthetics: anime versus Disney versus Henry Selick versus etc. But being literally the most junior animator in the whole building, spending time with people like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/producing-animation-michael-fukushima\/\" target=\"_blank\">Michael Fukushima<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/lightbox-janet-perlman\/\" target=\"_blank\">Janet Perlman<\/a> and all of the other animators at the NFB, I began to pick up on this idea that maybe animation is an end in itself; that putting down a thought and advancing it one frame at a time is its own sort of music that has nothing to do with the cosmetics of animation. Regardless of what story\u2014or non-story\u2014they were telling, and regardless of what specific medium they were using, all of the animators at the NFB were committed to this very beautiful and stupid idea of breaking down a moment into its component parts and putting it back together again\u2014but maybe with a little push here, or a little stall there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/ice_ages\/embed\/player\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Can you describe your creative background up to that point?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I was a graduate of the U of T Visual Studies program, studying under George Hawken, Colin Campbell, Kim Andrews, Lisa Steel and Kim Tomczak.<br \/>\nAfter university, I worked primarily as an illustrator and video artist and secretly made comic books and wrote screenplays on the side. Eventually, my brothers (both musicians) and I started a studio, PPF House, which makes music and videos (both as independent artists and as freelance contractors).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>What were the circumstances that led to your latest NFB production <em>BAM<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I had spent much of the previous five years developing shows for Disney and while I quite like that work\u2014it\u2019s fun and a good muscle to exercise\u2014by the end of it I had started itching to doing something more personal again, something that I could really control every frame of. I started talking to Michael Fukushima (Executive Producer of English Animation at the NFB) about working together on something again and luckily, just as things were winding down with the mainstream work, there seemed to be an opening in the programming slate at the NFB. Michael was interested in some of the stuff my brothers and I were doing together in combining music and animation, so he suggested I put a pitch together that had a heavy music component.<br \/>\nFor a long time my older brother, Tim (who co-wrote the score), had had this idea of taking the old Hanna Barbera shtick of playing drum solos behind fight scenes and trying to make it actually emotionally engaging. At the same time, I had always wanted to make a film about boxing. <em>BAM<\/em> was the result of all of that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-23655 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/bam-movie-poster.jpg\" alt=\"bam-movie-poster\" width=\"300\" height=\"450\" \/>\n<p><strong>Interspersed throughout the film are images of Greek Gods overseeing the events as they play out. What do these represent to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Harry, the protagonist of the film, is a bookish, mild-mannered kid who just so happens to have a profound instinct and talent for violence. Today, that combination of thoughtfulness and physical power seems unlikely, even contradictory, but the partisan politics of lovers versus fighters that Harry struggles with doesn\u2019t exist for the classical heroes that populate his book collection. Odysseus, Beowulf, Zatoichi, Batman\u2014all of them are brilliant and sensitive; all of them are bruisers. By mythological standards, Harry is really quite a normal hero doing exactly what he should be doing. The problem is that he doesn\u2019t live in the mythological world.<br \/>\nI think (<em>I think<\/em>) the Gods in the film are a manifestation of that idea. Subjecting classical archetypes and values to contemporary judgments was a way to explore the broader cultural and literary context of Harry\u2019s condition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>The film reportedly draws from recollections of your own grandfather. Can you expand on how and to what extent his life had a role in the film\u2019s story?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Again, it comes down to that false dichotomy we live with today, of lovers vs. fighters. My grandfather was both a high-ranking police official in Taiwan\u2014a brutal man by occupation\u2014but also a revered calligrapher and poet. Whenever I tell people that, they tell me how strange that combination is, but really at that time, in that place, I don\u2019t know that it was. <em>BAM<\/em> comes largely out of a question about who my grandfather would be if he was growing up today, subjected to our modern judgments and definitions. Would he have to choose between his physicality and his intellect, and what do you do with all of that power if you have no wars to fight and no dragons to slay?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Was there any other research into the psychology and physiology of uncontrollable rage when developing the film?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Hmmm\u2026 no. That probably would have been a good idea. Haha. In the end, I think I was ultimately more interested in rage as a problem versus rage as a phenomenon (if that makes sense). What I mean is that, for example, I\u2019ve read articles about the chemistry of love and infatuation, it\u2019s fascinating stuff and does inform my experience and discussions of it, but ultimately it doesn\u2019t help when coping with a broken heart\u2014whereas a love song, somehow, does.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/bam\/clip\/bam_clip\/embed\/player\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<strong>The film features music from your brothers Tim and Leo, do you often collaborate together on creative projects?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Yes. Our parents force us to. Haha. In fact, it really is something we\u2019ve done ever since we were, well, alive: tell stories, play in bands, make films\u2014although it wasn\u2019t until after university that we made it official when we started up our studio, PPF House. Now we do a lot of each other\u2019s independent projects but help out on contract work. We\u2019ve done stuff for Disney, Nike, the CBC, UN-Habitat, lots of different clients. We\u2019re mostly based in Toronto and Taipei but also spend a lot of time working with musicians and artists in New York.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Interestingly, the protagonist\u2019s temper seems to be represented not by the colour red but purple. Can you describe what went into the development of the overall palette used in the film?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I started out wanting the film to feel like the drawings I had just started exploring in my sketchbooks\u2014experiments combining ballpoint pen and Chinese ink wash and brush pens. Filmmaking vocabulary all seems so epic these days, I think what I liked was the theatre of telling a very big, dramatic story using a very limited selection of basic tools.<br \/>\nThe idea of avoiding red specifically came from Michael Fukushima, who suggested it was a little clich\u00e9. That led me towards finding a softer, less obvious colour that might help remove the automatic associations that come with a red rage\u2014machismo, vitriol, bloodlust\u2014and allow us to look at this thing a little more scientifically: What exactly is this thing that takes over when we tip over into violence? Does it have a purpose? A moral? A gender?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>As with\u00a0<em>Flutter<\/em>, a major component of\u00a0<em>BAM<\/em>\u2019s initial atmosphere is a gritty, urban backdrop. Does this type of environment have particular resonance for you as a visual artist?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I think much of my interest in urban settings is actually a symptom of my love for classical mythologies. I respond really strongly to the primordial poetics and rituals of old myths and I like digging through the civility and technology and politics of modern cities to see if you can still find traces of those ancient stories in the scaffolding. Is there a relationship between the primordial melodrama of, say, on the one hand, Atlas struggling beneath the weight of heaven and, on the other, that exquisite mundaneness of Prufrock measuring out his life with coffee spoons?<br \/>\nOn any given day on the subway you can find yourself sandwiched between, on the one side, a twitchy 20-something telemarketer who lives entirely for Instagram, and on the other side, a hard-ass immigrant grandmother whose entire day is spent appeasing superstitions from the old country. And both of them have the newest iPhone. I like exploring the space in between those two people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong><em>Flutter<\/em><\/strong><strong>\u00a0also seemed to deal with the theme of escape, would you say in certain respects this is also the case with\u00a0<em>BAM<\/em>,\u00a0in the lead character\u2019s struggle with himself?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>That\u2019s a good question. In fact, I think it\u2019s possible that the boxer actually resents the notion that his violent streak is a flaw\u2014certainly it\u2019s not for the heroes of the stories he reads and certainly it has provided for him in its own way. There\u2019s no doubt that he is frustrated by the fact that the world around him judges him for his temper, but whether he means to escape that world or pound it into submission is hard to say for me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.nfb.ca\/film\/flutter_en\/embed\/player\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<strong>If I\u2019m not mistaken,\u00a0<em>Flutter<\/em>\u00a0was largely (entirely?) animated in Photoshop. Was this also the case with BAM or were there other software\/process used this time around?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Yeah, <em>Flutter<\/em> was all done in Photoshop, just by clicking layers on and off really fast. I didn\u2019t know how to get the lines and textures I wanted otherwise. This time around, luckily, there was TV Paint, so production was really straightforward: I did rough boards in Photoshop and animated in TV Paint. We did the film in 4K so the drawings had to be huge and took a long time to do (TV Paint drawings are in pixels, not vectors, so you can\u2019t just scale up and down) but it was worth it for the line quality and texture we got out of it.<br \/>\nAll of the backgrounds were drawn in ballpoint pen and Chinese ink wash (I grind the ink out by hand) on a really interesting paper called Terraskin, which is made mostly of calcium carbonate and has the amazing feature of not buckling under water.<br \/>\nEverything was composited in After Effects and cut together in Premiere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Do you have any future plans as far as what you wish to do with\u00a0<em>BAM<\/em>\u00a0now that it\u2019s out there, or any other creative projects on the boil?<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Well, I hope <em>BAM<\/em> has a healthy and successful festival run. It was made in 4K and has a gorgeous 7.1 Dolby mix so it\u2019s really meant to be experienced in a theatre. I\u2019m also starting work on a graphic novel that is a sequel of sorts to <em>BAM<\/em>\u2014about the next generation, as it were\u2014that is both much longer and quieter than its predecessor.<br \/>\nOther than that, I\u2019m at the beginning of a whole bunch of things: I\u2019m developing an animated kids\u2019 adventure series for TV; a YA graphic novel; and PPF has just started working out an online animated project set in the Taipei hip-hop community.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>BAM<\/strong><em><strong> will play this week in Montreal as part of the <a href=\"http:\/\/cinematheque.qc.ca\/fr\/programmation\/projections\/panorama-quebec-canada-1\" target=\"_blank\">Panorama Qu\u00e9bec-Canada<\/a> of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cinematheque.qc.ca\/fr\/node\/10628\" target=\"_blank\">Sommets du cin\u00e9ma d\u2019animation<\/a> on November 28th alongside other recent NFB productions <\/strong><\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/sheldon-cohen\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>My Heart Attack<\/strong><\/a><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/sheldon-cohen\/\" target=\"_blank\"> (Dir. Sheldon Cohen)<\/a> and <\/strong><\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/hothouse10-alexandra-lemay\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>All The Rage<\/strong><\/a><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.skwigly.co.uk\/hothouse10-alexandra-lemay\/\" target=\"_blank\"> (Dir. Alexandra Lemay)<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Toronto-based Howie Shia&#8217;s work as an animator, illustrator and director has seen him creatively involved with clients including Disney, Nike and Freemantle. A co-founder of production company PPF House alongside his brothers Tim and Leo, Howie has also channeled his creative energies into a series of personal films. His fourth animated short produced with the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":23658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,755],"tags":[3229,3231,3230,3688,3691,1757,693,557,3692,3689,3690],"class_list":["post-23503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-interviews","tag-bam","tag-flutter","tag-howie-shia","tag-ice-ages","tag-leo-shia","tag-michael-fukushima","tag-national-film-board-of-canada","tag-nfb","tag-peggy-baker-four-phrases","tag-ppf-house","tag-tim-shia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.6 - 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