The Boys, original animation

My latest film, The Boys, to start things off...

When I decided to make an animation, my intention was to try and take the flow of speech and spoken meaning, and translate it into the flow of images and layers of visual meaning, something like Josh Raskin's excellent "I Met the Walrus". But then I heard an amazing poem written by one of my housemates, Frankie - very visual but with a consistently strong emotional tone - which immediately set me thinking of how I could translate the words and their meanings into a flow of images.

I planned out the sequence of 'scenes' in about five minutes, in the hope that my instinctual stream-of-consciousness would successfully capture the feel of the poem without making it seem too contrived and calculated, and I stuck to that plan 100% throughout.

The film is a mixture of straight video I filmed across London (my house up in Harrow and Regents Park), images I sourced from the internet, and the majority of it is rotoscoped animation. My technique for doing this was to film my friends acting out everything I needed, import this video into Adobe ImageReady and cut it down to individual frames at 12fps, and literally trace over every frame with my graphics tablet. Obviously I took some shortcuts and copy+paste for background and other constant elements, but I was literally working on it every second of my waking life for a good month. I turned nocturnal, like Batman but with a Bamboo Wacom tablet instead of a utility belt. I'd wake up at 5pm and work on it uninterupted till I slept at 9am, fuelled by a soundtrack of Four Tet and the Album Leaf (the track "Shine" I put in the finished film).

There are bits of the finished film that could definitely be better. Fabric boy's face, for example (holding gloved hands up beside his face), is more frog than human. The stop motion photo sequence (which eventually goes up in flames) took so much time, paper, matches, and burning of my girlfriend's fingers, and didn't reach the effect I wanted. And there are definite sound and rendering issues that need to be sorted out.

But overall I'm pleased with the finished piece - I think I managed to compliment and engage with the poem's emotional tone, and the layering, transformation and flow of images is pretty smooth. With a bit of extra work, and music licensing, I hope to eventually submit it to some animation festivals and see how it does.

The Boys

Tree-boy had branches
and roots that tripped
Others up.
And I watched him
From behind a scribbling pad
Full of doodles of his head
And his messy hair.
I followed him and made him
Escort me everywhere.

Rubble-boy was quiet
And hard to catch.
He was quick like the romance
Between a light switch
And the bulb.
He cracked pavements with
His walk and was dizzy for
The movement of the city.
But he was so still at night,
A statue.

Plastic-boy was made of
Wire and circuit boards
That sparked when he
Asked me to pour, over him,
Cups and cups and cups and cups
Of tap water.
He locked me in electric arms
And rotated, a dance.
He asked me to stay and melted
Parts of his face with a lighter
When I went away.

Fabric-boy made my hair
Stand up with static
And made my skin itch
When he rubbed his rough parts
Made of wool and nylon
Against me.
I washed him
And put him in the tumble dryer.
He shrunk a little
One night I came to see him
And he had sewed
Silk into parts of his body
So I could slide over him,
Softly.

By Francesca Eva Ashcroft

Vertumnus

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was a sixteenth-century artist most famous for his bizarre representational portraits, paintings of a range of objects arranged in human form. The painting below is entitled Vertumnus, and merges together fruit, vegetables and flowers in a celebration of life and vitality, whilst simultaneously showing Vertumnus (the Roman god of seasons and change), and is officially a portrait of Rudolf II, ruler of Bohemia and the surrounding countries. And it looks amazing.

Rudolf II was a strange, reclusive ruler whose political career paled beside his patronage of contemporary culture, research into alchemy and the occult, and his sprawling collections of art that he kept in his residence at Prague Castle. Arcimboldo is one of the most well-known artists who walked the corridors of that castle, and his imaginative portraits have had a deep impact on artists, particularly of the last century such as the Surrealists (in particular Jan Svankmajer, whose brilliant animations often directly reference Arcimboldo - alot more Svakmajer discussion to come in this blog!). But Guiseppe Arcimboldo also had the important job of managing the massive Wunderkammer (a larger version of a "cabinet of curiosities") in Rudolf II's court. He devoted huge wings of his castle to a dense collection of objects from around the globe, objects that ranged from globes and atlases, to skeletons and rare furs, to rocks and precious gems, to tapestry and painting - almost surrealist in its juxtaposition, but highly realist and modernist in its encyclopaedic aims.

Here is where I make the convuluted link between Rudolf II's "cabinet of curiosities" and my humble blog, which I intend to be a mystery window into my own mental cabinet of curiosities - both a record for myself of things I find (music, films, photography, websites, articles), and a chart of my own creative output. Hopefully this will be a way of stepping back from the individual bits of artistic material I find and create all the time, allowing me to view everything from a wider angle.

You can expect regular updates and a wide range of material, and a promise that my future posts won't contain any of the border-line pretentiousness contained in the this post.