…And what a fucked up year it was.
It’s about time I updated here and talked about some of my recent projects and work to come. Weeks ago I finished up my sting for the London Animation Festival, though I’d rather not talk about it too much. I have very mixed feelings about it, though the end result is at least something I’m fairly satisfied with.
Let’s talk about pointalism for a minute.
Pointalism is usually defined as a series of dots that together create an image, the distribution of the dots creating the illusion of shadow, light, weight and tone. Claude Monet was famous for his use of pointalism in paint form.
Most people would probably faint at the thought of creating an animated piece done entirely by drawing every single dot by hand. Every frame would take hours, days, possibly weeks. And that’s precisely how long it took me to create the six hundred or so drawings for my Children’s Society project. I had originally drawn and plotted out the roughs for more than twice that amount – the unfinished drawings lie next to my desk in a box as I type this.
I often joked that it was my Thief and Cobbler. It’s very much true – what the Children’s Society is going to get is only a fraction of what could have been, cobbled together from all of the finished drawings I had. The whole film could have been five minutes long, but pointalism is laborious. I sadly didn’t manage to finish every single drawing in time and my perfectionism probably worked against me.
But be that as it may there’s nothing to stop me from picking up those unfinished drawings and completing them one day, perhaps when I’ve reached the end of this course. I can finish those drawings, I can extend the work and add more. I’ve got a good mind to create a whole feature-length surrealist film out of this. I don’t mind if it takes fifty years, I can have a lot of fun doing it and do it for my own reasons.
And after all of this there’s the final film, the piece de resistance. This will be the most important film we all make on this course. And I’ve got plans for mine already. The best way I can describe my idea is a Roadrunner cartoon set in the London tube station. It’s a British Looney Toon. A Cockney fox pursues a Scouse guinea pig through an Escher-esque warren of tunnels in an empty Oxford Circus underground station, but the pig always eludes him. Though I don’t imagine there will be much dialogue from either of these two characters, other than perhaps a brief line at the end or occassional mumbling (the guinea pig, being a Liverpudlian named Ringo, could possibly sing a few lines of Waterloo Sunset disguised as a busker at one point). The backgrounds will be modelled on Roy Naisbitt’s inimitable for The Thief and the Cobbler and The Last Belle.
I’ve practically planned out the timing of the first minute to this piece of music.
I think my next post will be a look at my personal favourite adaptation of A Christmas Carol and Dave Unwin’s Father Christmas, which are both tonally different, but I saw both in a triple bill at the BFI two years ago, with Unwin and Richard Williams at the Q&A panel.