While many cinematic title sequences suffer from a sense of auto-pilot, the main title for Cirque du Freak keeps you guessing. Taking on the thrust of a children’s nightmare, the resulting aesthetic is innocent but deftly tuned with motifs of fear—a surefire way to take the edge off the sweetness.
Borrowed from themes developed by the film’s director, Paul Weitz, the typography serves a dual purpose in providing information, while also being extensions of the puppets themselves. By redrawing original woodcut lettering, the typeface takes inspiration from lithographic circus banners, and as a narrative device, leads the children along an ominous journey. Cracked from the vault of graphic design, inspiration for the letterforms where drawn from the stylistic sentiments of Dada, shadow puppetry and German Expressionism.
The result is decorative but highly engaging, with an undercurrent of darkness and grit à la Tim Burton. Even so, similar themes are vested in the main-on-end titles for Lemony Snickets A Series of Unfortunate Events, and in this piece, a renewed bond between Hollywood horror and the big, fat orchestral score. Through a string of slick transitions, the entire sequence strides forward with a sense of athletic perseverance resolving in moments of compositional clarity.
HunterGatherer is the latest artist to be commissioned by Fuel TV for one of their award-winning Signature Series IDs. The new stop-motion spot is inspired by the idea of synthesia, with music transformed directly into the spare and graphic visual style of Todd St. John. Bright, stimulating and very impressive.
Good Monday morning Motionographer readers. Maybe you are confused as to why we are starting this week out by posting a trailer for some big budget sci-fi movie. Would it make you more interested to know that this trailer for a short film was produced entirely by a single person?
Matthew Santoro, a Senior VFX artist who has worked on large scale productions such as “300″ and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”, is the sole talent behind this epic sci-fi piece. Santoro draws upon his vfx background to make guerrilla style filming look like a highly polished Hollywood flick, yet due to this being his own creation there is a unique life to his aesthetics and effects. In his own words, “I directed, edit, animated, composed, built costumes/ props and bled over this thing for almost 2 years”. Santoro has the creative versatility and drive most wistfully desire, a combination of skills that leads us to expect big thing from him in the future. First and foremost will be the opportunity this short has opened for him, which is to create a feature length film based in the same world.
I got a chance to ask the man himself a few questions about this project and his plans for the future.
I’m guessing that this started as a one man production and has since grown. How many others are now involved in this production?
Well the trailer that you just watched was basically a one-man production. I had to put the thing together from the ground up. Of course with a little help from my friends. Which meant anyone willing to deal with the consequences of possible getting busted for sneaking onto rooftops in the middle of the night. There were parts of this project that I literally filmed in my apartment using cardboard boxes, cheap hardware store lights, and a half-broken fog machine. I built the costumes using model parts and superglue. Most of the time my actors where doubling as crew even my dad (Charlie Santoro) who was playing that scary guy with the silver hair.
Do you know have any financial backers for your project now that it is a feature length film?
After this spec trailer came out and I released it on the Internet the response was pretty overwhelming. Everyone thought it was a movie that was already in production. I just made this thing to get people interested in backing it. I am currently in negotiations with a couple of companies who are hopefully going to help me move forward. Everything is still up in the air as of right now.
How did your process begin? Did you have a world built as a story with a plan to showcase only a small window with the short. Or did this world evolve and grow as you worked on the short?
I would say that the world definitely evolved as I worked on the short. I had an idea for what it was I wanted to accomplish at first but that idea slowly started to grow into something bigger as the months went on. I would get time off from work, film on an occasional weekend, take it back, and edit it. Something new would pop into my head and because it was purely independent I had the luxury of experimentation. So I would change things based on the direction in which it was headed. It’s almost like painting a picture on a blank canvas. That canvas is yours and there are no rules and nobody can tell you what to do. So you have something in mind and once you start painting that thing turns into something completely different. Like a reaction to a reaction if that makes any sense.
How close are you to a finished piece? Is there any release date that we can all mark down?
I look at this spec trailer like a finished piece in a way. 1.5 years of blood sweat and tears for 3 minutes of sci-fi geekiness. At the end of the day it served its purpose and a door has been opened to turn it into a feature length film. Now that the door has opened I have to figure out what hallway to walk down, and all those hallways have other doors in them that lead to other hallways with other doors. So with that being said no release date has been set. I will keep you posted.
While the 30 second version of Psyop’s latest spot for Michelin, Evil Gas Pump, has been burning up the circuits, we at Motionographer were waiting it out for the newly released, uncut 45 second version.
Through a sweet overture, it starts with a kiss, but like so many things, takes a turn for the worse. Indeed, Evil Gas Pump is a short-story of long-form proportions, and in this spot, there’s an acute awareness of detail from the environments to character development to shot selection. In every aspect of the production, there is an aggressive push toward raising the bars of CG and commercial, short-form storytelling.
With Corin Hardy’s recent jump and jive piece for Paolo Nutini, it appears he has taken a turn toward the lighter side. A comical, life-sized clay version (created by some of the animators who worked on ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’) of Paolo dances with a live band. However, the piece makes a u-turn when the properties of this character become the source of his demise.
“My aim with this video was to set up a situation where a clay Paolo would live in a real world and behave just like a real person. Once the viewer has accepted that, I then wanted to break the rules I had devised for myself and see what goes on when a clay Paolo just pushes it a bit too far.
“I got very lucky with the animators. Fantastic Mr Fox had just wrapped and the lead animator Mark Waring, and Andy Gent – who built all the puppets for the film – were both available and agreed to do the video.
“It was shot in a TV studio previously graced by Gloria Hunniford’ chat show, and somehow this felt strangely fitting. We shot each take in two versions, one with a stand-in Paolo dancer and then one without. The animation was matched to the stand-in wherever possible and this helped us get the very real movement into the clay Paolo that I wanted.
Paolo Nutini’s Pencil Full Of Lead by Corin Hardy“The animation schedule was brutal. We had three weeks to animate and I pretty much moved into Clapham Rd Studios. Due to the animation needing to be composited into live action, it had to be 25 frames a second which gives the movement a beautiful rich feel, but is really tough work and there are no short cuts.
“The post happened as we went along, and it was inspiring to see the shots come back 24 hours later bedded into the film and actually see the laborious work coming to life.”
Credits:
Paolo Nutini
Pencil Full Of Lead (Atlantic)
Director: Corin Hardy
Producer: Liz Kessler
Prod co: Academy
DoP: Ed Wild
Styling: Hannah Glossop
Choreographer: Natricia Bernard
Art Director: Laura Johnstone
Animation: Mark Waring
Additional Animation: Tobias Fouracre (& Corin Hardy)
Animation Lighting Cameraman: Matt Day
Puppet Fabricator: Andy Gent
Puppet Design: Ben Kovar
Editor: Nick Allix at Whitehouse
Post: Amarjeet Singh at Soho Post
Colorist: Mark Horrobin at Smoke & Mirrors
Commissioner: Tim Nash
Watch: here
Christian Borstlap recently finished these deliciously simple animated illustrations for Dutch children’s charity, Kinderpostzegels. Paul Postma did a great job of bringing Christian’s colourful illustrations to life, complimenting them with a playfully restrained animation style to really let their personalities shine.
Yellow Cake is a new short film by Nick Cross, an Ottawa-based animator who has worked for everyone from Nickelodeon to Spumco over the course of his career. He calls Yellow Cake a “lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth.” Animated in Flash, with digitally painted backgrounds, the fine-tuned muted color palette, retro-styled animation and the symphonic, almost saccharine, music all work to lure you into a tale of adorable blue creatures who spend all day baking and then eating their own delicious yellow cakes. But soon the tide turns, and Nick’s film explores a modern parable of terrorism and war, addressing our own attention span in a devastating way.
1. Can you give us a brief run-down of your animation background, other shorts films you’ve done or commercial work that’s been notable in developing your own films?
A. I’ve been working in the commercial animation world since 1996, mostly working on children’s television programming. Since two of the things I enjoy the most is drawing and films, animation was a natural fit for me. However, since I never went to animation school, working in animation was a good education and grounding for making my own animated films later. I made my first film in 1998 just to sort of learn animation, and I’ve been making films ever since.
2. What was the specific inspiration for Yellow Cake?
A. In 2003, while I was working on my previous film, The Waif of Persephone, there was a lot of talk in the media about Iraq purchasing yellow cake uranium. It was talked about so much that it was eventually just referred to as yellow cake, which I thought was pretty funny since they were speaking in such ominous tones about a tasty dessert treat. I just kept thinking about it, forming the story in my head until I finished Waif of Persephone in 2006, and then I jumped right on to working on Yellow Cake.
3. I know that you’ve mentioned that you’ve worked on this film (off and on) for almost three years. Even then, at over 8 minutes, how did you ever find the time to make this all on your own?
A. Over the years, I’ve developed a pretty streamlined production method through trial-and-error. Working almost entirely digitally now saves me a lot of time; I draw right into Flash with a Cintiq tablet and paint all of the backgrounds in Photoshop. I think that I could have made the entire film in just a few months if I didn’t have to keep putting it on the shelf to do commercial jobs, but such is the life of an independent filmmaker.
4. Did you deliberately use a few visual cues from well-known photographs from history? We’re thinking of the famous Napalm Girl photo and the Orwellian / They Live references in the town… Are there any others we might have missed?
A. Yes, definitely. I think that photograph from the Vietnam War really encapsulates the horror of war, so I couldn’t help referencing it. Also, 1984 is my favorite book so I couldn’t help but put some Orwellian imagery in there. The only other overt reference that I put in the film is to the Disney short, The Brave Little Tailor. When all the cats are freaking out near to the end of the film is based off of the montage of the villagers yelling “Seven in one blow!”.
5. The ending of the film leaves the fate of the little blue guys a little bit up in the air, cutting right to cartoons, music, sports and a final test pattern before the film ends. Watching the film leaves the audience itself a bit complicit: we’re all cats, aren’t we? Is there a call to action there?
A. It’s not really a call to action, it’s just sort of my thoughts about how we as a society view war. We are interested up to a point and then, since it doesn’t really affect us in our everyday lives, we get distracted and kind of forget that there is even a war still going on.
Thanks, Nick! Good luck with the film on the festival circuit and with the release of a DVD collection of your work. We’re looking forward to that.
We should also mention that Nick is one of the creators of the pilot for Angora Napkin which premiered at the Ottawa International Animation Festival a few weeks ago.
Hot off the festival circuit, Tim Bollinger of Via Grafik recently shared his latest short “Between” with us. This dark, surreal piece travels through grounds and walls and into moments stuck in time. As Tim puts it, “It’s a journey through worlds of the subconscious, allowing us to catch sinister glimpses of the human psyche’s ambivalence.”
Despite the mix of techniques (stop-motion, still photos animation in 2.5D, 3D elements, etc) the film still possesses a consuming visceral and visual cohesion.
Check out these three recent projects from the Brazilian Birdo Studio: Sempre Livre is a poppy, colorful Flash animated spot that was made in just 2 weeks for agency Samurai. Birdo, designed, directed, animated and handled the script as well and said they’re “proud to be able to make a commercial for sanitary napkins completely free of blue liquids!” Amen to that.
Pode Acreditar (You Can Believe) is a fun cel-animated music video, with comical and fantastic drawings appearing over the live-action shots of Marcelo D2 and Seu Jorge. In concept, it can be compared to the D.A.N.C.E. video, the Kid Cudi video or any of the many VH1 and MTV promos like this one from Click 3x that have used the same idea. Yet the personal drawing style and execution here don’t make it seem derivative at all, after all, it’s just a technique and a process.
Finally, the 33rd São Paulo International Film Festival is a collaborative project directed by Amir Admoni with characters designed by the world-renowned graffiti artists Os Gemeos. Birdo handled character animation for the festival opener.
Three cool, new, diverse projects from a small and very capable character animation studio. Fly high, Birdo, fly high!
Taking a sculptural approach, three of the Lexus’ new features are represented through visual analogy. As some car work seems to exploit the peak of technical and stylistic saturation, it’s always refreshing to see directors take a more subtle approach.
Though this spot was produced while at Rabbit, Raf has recently joined Skunk for US representation.
Agency: Team One Advertising
Creatives: Chris Graves (CCO), James Hendry & Craig Crawford (GCD), Molly Grubbs (Copywriter), Ryan Fluet (Art Director)
Agency Exec Producer: Jennifer Weinberg
Agency Producer: Helen Park
Production Company: Rabbit
Director: Raf Wathion
Director of Photography: Stephen Blackman
Exec Producer: Anura Idupuganti
Line Producer: Fred Vrancken
Editing Company: Butcher
Editor: Dave Henegar
Music: Robot Repair
Post Production: The Mill / Los Angeles
Executive Producer: Sue Troyan
Producer: Arielle Davis
Shoot Attend: John Leonti
Lead Flame Artist: Giles Cheetham
Assistant Artists: Ant Walsham, Billy Higgins, Gavin Camp, Mike Plescia, Shane Zinkhon
CG Lead: John Leonti
CG Artists: Michael Panov, Meng-Yang Lu
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