The nights are growing darker and there’s a chill in the air. Halloween is almost upon us! To celebrate the season, I have some scarily good workshops for your school or club to enjoy.
Zombie Make-up Effects
Transform into a gory zombie using professional special effects make-up techniques.
£150 for up to 20 people*
Apparition – Drawn Animation
Work as a group to make shape-shifting ghosts and ghouls materialise using hand drawn animation techniques.
£150 for up to 10 people*
Haunted House – Paper Cut Out Animation
Use paper animation techniques to create a haunted house filled with things that go bump in the night.
£150 for up to 10 people*
Each workshop is a 3 hour session with all materials and equipment provided.
Workshops are suitable for all ages and abilities.
Email contact@evanwilkinson.co.uk to book now. Availability is limited so book early to avoid disappointment.
*Workshops are charged at £150 within the local Brighton area. Work outside of the Brighton area may necessitate further charges.
Evan Wilkinson, Community Filmmaker
Evan is a local filmmaker with over 15 years of experience in delivering workshops and providing industry training. He is currently an industry tutor at the Brighton Digital Media Academy.
During the summer of 2012 I was working on an animation project for the Brighton Photo Biennial, working in partnership with Photoworks, Brighton & Hove City Library Services and the Youth Arts Project, part of Brighton & Hove City Council’s Youth Service. The brief was to provide a series of animation workshops for young people exploring the Biennial’s theme of the Politics of Space and to create digital stories for an exhibition at Jubilee Library. The project is called Tales of the City.
As an animator I am drawn to methods that are comparably low-tech by today’s standards. I’m fascinated by antiquities such as Zoetropes and Magic Lanterns and I love the organic nature of traditional drawn animation and stop motion puppetry. I think it’s important to be hands on and to have a physical connection with your work. Animation is a method of performance because your work is the result of your own personality. Your characters are born of you. The relationship between the animator and the world that they create is one that is very personal.
I was eager to introduce the young people to as many different animation techniques as possible so as to really allow them to experiment. Experimentation is what animation is all about. It was through experimentation that moving image was born and that experimentation allows the medium to evolve constantly. I wanted to include some examples of this evolution in my work for this project.
I started with simple optical illusions based around the concept of persistence of vision – thaumatropes, zoetropes and flick books. It was important to me to begin by demonstrating how animation can be created without the use of cameras and computers, especially when working with young people who may not have access to such equipment at home.
For me, the digital process is necessary to my work, but secondary to the drawings, puppets and sets that I create. The computer is there as a capture device and to refine the work in post-production but what an animator can produce with their own hands is the true magic of the medium.
The young people began by making thaumatropes – optical toys that create an illusion by combining two images on either side of a disk when it is spun quickly. I wanted to start with something small and simple that would produce an instantaneous result. Animation can be so time consuming and requires such patience that it can be off-putting for beginners and the real joy for someone having a go for the first time is to see their creation come to life in front of them. As important as it is for people to understand animation methods and techniques, it is vital for them to experience that little bit of magic for the first time.
As well as an understanding of techniques, it was important to also build an understanding of the Biennial’s theme into the work. The Politics of Space is a difficult concept to engage with and the challenge was to distil it into something that would engage young people and lend itself to creative work. The key was to make it relevant to them, to allow them to engage with the ideas and relate them to their own experiences. I decided to focus on local identity and the relationship that the young people had with their environment, using this to introduce them to the underlying politics within their space.
To begin with, we explored Brighton’s identity through discussion and drawings, creating a palette of Brighton iconography to draw into our animations. The young people created imagery that typified Brighton and then translated it into a beautiful hand drawn animation.
We then explored particular spaces on a closer level, discussing where the young people felt safe and welcome, where they liked to hang out and what places they avoided. It was interesting to explore Brighton from their perspective and to examine the different atmosphere and personality that you will find in different areas around the city. I wanted to make the young people aware of the politics of space by getting them to consider the rules and social norms they observe around the city and how these can change or influence their behaviour differently in different places.
After discussing Brighton’s various neighbourhoods I asked the young people to choose one space which they had all been to and that they thought had potential to explore through animation. The young people selected Brighton Marina, which is close to where a number of them live.
Brighton Marina is an interesting example of the politics of space at work in our local community. By its very location it is separate from the city with only one main route in and out by car and minimal pedestrian access, making it an almost self contained space. There is the obvious geographical divide between land and water. The residential part of the Marina is gated, restricting access to only those that live there, creating a landscape of barriers and exclusion. There is also a social divide as the expensive boats of the Marina are symbols of a lifestyle that only few can afford and yet its location, just south of Whitehawk means that some of the city’s least affluent residents use it as their nearest source of leisure.
The young people explored maps and aerial photos to create a bird’s eye view of Brighton Marina, which they animated using paper cut out techniques. We started by creating our set and then breaking it down into moving elements such as the sea, cars, buses and boats. All of these were then combined to create a day in the life of Brighton Marina.
The young people then discussed their own relationships with the Marina – how they get there, what they do when they’re there and where they do and don’t go. These experiences were recorded as voice over, so that each member of the group could tell their own story. Finally, each member of the group made a paper cut-out version of themselves to animate their part of the story.
Every Saturday throughout the Biennial, the young people shared what they learnt through drop in animation workshops or children aged 5-11 at Jubilee and Whitehawk Libraries.
All of the work created for this project was exhibited in the Young People’s space at Jubilee Library during the Photo Biennial.
About the Author:
Evan Wilkinson is a Community Filmmaker based in Brighton. As well as producing videos and community film projects, Evan teaches workshops in filmmaking, script development and animation. For more information please visit: http://evanwilkinson.co.uk
This was a short film made by children from Years 3 and 4 at Meon Junior School in Portsmouth. It was part of a Creative Partnerships project focused on literacy. The group had already worked with another company to devise a fairytale-like story. I was tasked with showing the children how to turn that story into an animation through a series of workshops.
We began by breaking the story into scenes and discussing how scenes are laid out in a script. It was not long before we had adapted the group’s story into a script to use whilst shooting. Following this, we explored shot language and the group learned about how to use master shots, close-ups and cut-aways to tell their story visually. Armed with this knowledge the group were able to create a shot list and a storyboard for their animation.
The next thing the group had to tackle was character design and so we discussed what the characters should look like and what physical attributes we could give them to enhance their personalities. Based on this list of qualities and descriptions the class drew their ideas for each character and then voted for their favourites to make the final decisions.
Once we knew what the characters looked like we turned our attention to the animation’s sets and used a similar process to design the different environments of the story.
Once the design stage was complete, we moved onto construction. I led the group through a workshop on how to make articulated puppets for paper cut-out animation and then we assigned teams to start work on each of the characters and sets. This was a difficult job as the children had to take into account the ways in which each character needed to move as well as making sure we had removable features for every facial expression required for each of the characters.
We also had to create versions of the puppets in different sizes, such as enlarged heads and facial features for close-ups. Added to all of this was the challenge of keeping every element of the animation in proportion so that it would work when we put it all together.
With all of our elements prepared, we were able to start animating the film. The group had a workshop to introduce them to animation techniques at the start of the project, so they would be familiar with the software and the process. Shooting out of sequence, the classes were split into small animation teams each with a few shots to complete. We only had two days in which to shoot the film. Everyone involved in the project also got to record narration and sound effects for the film, which were then combined when the film was edited.
This is one of the youngest age groups that I have worked with and so I was extremely impressed by the quality of their work within such a limited timeframe. The project was delivered and completed in the space of six weeks, with only a day of workshops each week for each class.
Happy Cloudwas an animated short film made by young people from Worthing Youth Media and funded by First Light. I ran this project, leading workshops that took the group through the process of developing their idea into a finished film. I helped the group to write and edit their script, design the characters, draw up storyboards and put together an animatic, then led them through animation workshops before the shooting of the film itself.
Happy Cloud was an idea that went through a lot of development. It was originally a short project that I ran workshops for in the summer term of 2008, but when the group’s application for First Light funding was successful, they decided to develop it further.
The original Happy Cloud was a short viral ad in which Happy Cloud smiled gleefully while a narrator spoke to him in voice over. The group had to develop the character in order to find a story for their film. The concept that they settled upon was the idea of a show within a show. Happy Cloud became the star of a children’s television series.
We animated the film using paper cut out animation techniques. We created backdrops and characters using bits of paper, plastic and fabric that we manipulated and swapped between each shot. The whole film has a flat, simplistic style. I really enjoy paper cut out animation as you have to think in different dimensions to stop motion puppetry. Although it looks easier, there are far less options available to you for movement and so bringing things to life can be quite a challenge.
The idea for Happy Cloud’s TV show was to create a playful and colourful world in the style of narrated cartoons such as the Mr Men and Mr Benn. The group decided that this would be a pastiche of children’s TV’s patronising tone and inane characters. We designed a title sequence for the show that would introduce the characters and the premise of Happy Cloud’s TV show and serve as an intro for our film, before pulling back to reveal the set, leading the audience into the ‘real’ world of the film.
Happy Cloud’s narrator speaks over the titles describing Cloud Land as the happiest place in the world, where ‘Happy Cloud makes everyone happy.’ To demonstrate Happy Cloud’s powers, we designed a factory conveyor belt of people forcibly being made happy one by one by Happy Cloud. We wanted to establish the subversive tone of the humour from the outset.
Happy Cloud’s character also needed fleshing out. A cloud who is happy isn’t much to work with. With that in mind the group thought about subverting the idea. They decided that to the viewers of his show Happy Cloud would seem like the perfect role model for children, but only until the cameras stopped rolling.
‘Offscreen’ Happy Cloud is the pampered star of the show – grumpy, vain, money hungry, alcoholic and demanding. We created three different sizes of Happy Cloud to allow us to alter his proportions to suit each shot’s requirements.
We then turned our attention to developing a cast of characters around Happy Cloud. The first was his co-star and onscreen nemesis Storm Cloud. We designed Storm Cloud as a foil for Happy Cloud. Storm Cloud looks tough but isn’t. He is a somewhat depressive character who gets pushed around by Happy Cloud.
Next we designed the Director of the show. The Director is the voice of authority for the characters, almost a parent figure. We decided to only show him in silhouette to give him a mysterious anonymity.
The main conflict of the film comes into play when the Director brings in an image consultant to give the show a ratings boosting makeover. He introduces Jiggy Bigwig, an enthusiastic character who claims to be down with the kids.
The team had a lot of fun writing and designing Jiggy’s character. They envisioned a man who wears clothes that are far too young for him, tries to act like he is still a kid but is hopelessly outdated and clueless.
One of Jiggy’s quirks is his attempts to speak like young people so we made a point of highlighting some of his jargon in cut-away shots.
Happy Cloud hates Jiggy but is convinced to accept his input when the Director hints that it could lead to more money and awards for the show. Then there is an accident on set which sends Happy Cloud crashing through the stage.
Unconscious, Happy Cloud has an out of body experience, floating up from the stage as a ghostly form of himself. We had fun designing the Ghost Happy Cloud, who we made out of translucent paper to give him an ethereal quality.
He meets Zany Funhouse, the awards fairy, who acts as his Ghost of Christmas Future to show him the error of his ways. Zany was partly modelled on Amy Winehouse (this was 2009) and styled as a partied out veteran of awards ceremonies with a tall beehive of hair that’s full of trophies and awards statues.
We decided to introduce Zany with a slow tilt, travelling up and up and up to emphasise the impossible height of her beehive hair. The hair felt a character in itself, so we decided that for an added punchline we’d make it exactly that, giving it a face and making it growl and jump off of her head at the end of the shot.
Zany waves her magic wand and whisks Ghost Happy Cloud away to see a vision of his future.
Ghost Happy Cloud finds himself at a glitzy awards ceremony, watching his future self arrive in a limo. This is my favourite shot in the film, as drunken Happy Cloud tumbles out of the limo. Happy Cloud’s anarchic behaviour was great fun to film and is taken to the next level by voice actor Ben Simpson.
One of the features of the red carpet scene was the paparazzi, snapping pictures at the side of the red carpet. We designed something very simple of this, using two rows of people and then moving holographic silver paper in and out of each frame to represent the camera flashes.
We envisioned the awards ceremony as the Oscars for the cartoon world and wanted the celebrity audience to be filled with cartoon characters. The group designed several members of the audience to resemble popular characters.
Paper cut-out animation works by moving pieces of paper, or changing and substituting them frame by frame. Substitution is particularly effective for facial expressions and dialogue. We had a range of eyes, eyebrows and mouths in different expressions and mouth shapes for each character which we then duplicated for each different sized version of the characters.
The screenshots below show the range of facial features we used to make a drunken Happy Cloud falling asleep at the awards ceremony.
With Happy Cloud asleep, Storm Cloud has to accept the award on Happy Cloud’s behalf, but just as he is doing this, Happy Cloud wakes up and storms the stage, hurling abuse at Storm Cloud and the shocked audience.
Then, to make matters worse, he throws up.
I was delighted when Happy Cloud won the award for Best Comedy at the First Light Movie Awards 2010. We attended the ceremony at the Odeon Leicester Square, where the award was presented to our young filmmakers by Bill Nighy and Nick Frost. Simon Bird, actor and comedian from The Inbetweeners, was one of the judges of the awards. This was his feedback on the film:
“Ambitious, inventive, unexpected. Slick and professional yet still imaginative and energetic, it is exactly what a short film should be – an interesting idea concisely and expertly brought to life.”
If you want to see more from behind the scenes then have a look at how the finished film compares to the animatic. The opening sequence in particular is very close to how we shot the finished version.
An animatic is when you put your storyboard together on a timeline to work out things like pace and timing. It can include test shots and sound, although we recorded our sound after the animation shoot. On a larger production the animatic can be used to fill in gaps when full scenes haven’t been shot yet. You might notice shots in the animatic that weren’t included in the film. This is because we had to cut a couple of scenes from the script to fit our shooting schedule.
If you’d like to learn animation techniques, or want to produce an animated film, please check out my website to see how I can help.
For my major project at University, I wrote and directed Elysium, a short film based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The film combines live action with stop motion animation. I also designed and built sets and puppets for the film.
In the original story, Orpheus’ lover Eurydice is bitten by a snake on the day of their wedding. She dies, and Orpheus travels to the Underworld to beg Hades to return her to him. Hades agrees, but only on the condition that Orpheus leads Eurydice through the Underworld and back to the land of the living without looking at her. Orpheus finds Eurydice and leads her through the Underworld, but at the last minute he looks back to see her and she dies a second time, this time forever.
In our adaptation of the story, Chris is the Orpheus character and his wife Laura, Eurydice. Laura is in a coma and the doctors have told Chris that there is no hope of her waking up. Chris visits a strange organisation, who offer him the chance to bring Laura back by travelling into her dreams to wake her up. The real world is filmed in live action, on digital video, and the dream world is animated with stop motion puppetry.
We constructed a hospital set in the studio, using flats that we wallpapered and painted and then hiring hospital props to give it an authentic feel. We visited an amazing company in London that had a huge warehouse full of hospital equipment and furniture for hire from different eras.
We wanted the film to have a very stylised look. As we were dealing with fantasy it was really important that the film have a dream-like look and fluidity. This was the opening scene and I wanted it to be moving and enigmatic. I chose cold blue lighting and arranged it to look like a spotlight around Laura, focusing attention to the centre of the screen and making the edges of the shot shadowy and vague.The idea of this scene was to introduce Laura and her plight in a way that was heightened, as if it was Chris’s nightmare. I wanted to represent Laura as a Sleeping Beauty and suggest the danger that she is in. I decided to show this by using an imperfect match cut from the tubes in Laura’s hand to a snake coiling itself around her wrist, drawing on the imagery from the original myth.
We used a real snake for this shot. We hired it from a taxidermist. It hadn’t been stuffed yet and it was being kept in a freezer. We needed to defrost it and keep it in the fridge between takes. It smelt horrible, and it was a pretty gross thing to handle. Our actress had to be really patient and keep her hand perfectly still while we animated it frame by frame. I was really pleased with the final effect.
For the organisation itself I wanted to create the idea of the afterlife as an inefficient bureaucracy. I had in mind that any organisation that deals with the public en masse – the tax office, the passport office, the job centre is a place of waiting rooms, queues and endless paperwork. If there is an afterlife, then in centuries of human existence it will have been inundated with souls that would be a nightmare to process and organise. For this reason I saw the lord of the underworld as an overworked filing clerk or administrator.
The passage from the waking world into Laura’s dreams was a difficult one. Not only did the character need to cross a metaphysical plane, but we also needed to make a transition from live action to animation. I have always been attracted to the illusion of cinema and so I decided to represent Chris’s journey as a magic trick of sorts.
Later in the film we mirrored this shot with the animated Chris.
To further the magic trick imagery we built a box for Chris to climb into. We wanted to create a magic and shamanistic method by which he could make this journey, and we used images of boxes and doors being opened throughout the film.
Chris is shut inside the box with a poisonous snake. We wanted to use the snake to link Chris to Laura through this experience, and also to suggest that the snake’s venom would cause Chris to hallucinate. Chris loses consciousness, and when he wakes up, he is a puppet inside Laura’s mind.
The challenge with Chris was in trying to make him look like Evan Locke, who plays Chris in the live action segments of the film. We learnt the hard way on this film that plasticine doesn’t retain much detail under lights, as it melts in the heat. Most of the resemblance was achieved through the costume. I remember spending a lot of time trying to model Evan’s face in plasticine but I think a lot of this detail was lost as soon as we started filming the puppets.
Elysium also saw a change to the design of my armatures, as I began using plastic tubes in the place of wooden dowels to create the puppet’s limbs. This enabled us to have lighter, slimmer puppets, which looked great but made them much harder to animate! We had a lot of broken limbs on this production, but we put the puppets through a lot, expecting them to climb stairs, fight and fall over, none of which are as easy to animate as you would imagine. I also chose not to use paper for the facial features on this production and set plastic eyeballs into the skulls of my armatures instead. I then created the pupils using a small ball of plasticine that I could then move and widen as and when I needed to.
One moment I particularly like from the film, is when Chris’s tie blows in the wind. I achieved this effect by lining the tie with wire that enabled to manipulate it into position shot by shot. It’s these sorts of tiny details that I really like to take my time with in animation.
For the first dreamscape, I wanted to create a sort of Dali-esque wasteland. This set represents the outskirts of Laura’s mind which at this stage I wanted to show as a sort of cluttered lost property of artefacts and memories. As we are now in the realms of the imagination and dealing with dream logic, I wanted to create a confused sense of scale. I also love to combine real objects with puppets when I animate which is a theme I developed throughout the sets for this section of the story.
I wanted this to be a feminine landscape, and so I littered the set with items you might find at the bottom of a Laura’s handbag. Laura’s condition throughout the film makes her a distant character, as these sets represent Laura’s internal world, they are a way to provide small character details visually.
Now that Chris has left the physical world, dream logic rules over everything and that includes the dimensions of the sets. Items move between shots and each set was designed to overlap so that we moved between scenes in a fluid way, as if dreaming. The staircase leads up to a landing where the next scene takes place. In order to overlap the two sets we built a detachable stairway into the landing set, so that it could be used for Chris to travel from one set to the other. We also tried to blend the stairway into the wasteland set, covering it in sand so that it seemed to have risen up out of the set organically.
The landing set is a deeper level of Laura’s subconscious, where we begin to see elements of her memories and dreams. The scene is actually based on a recurring nightmare I had as a child, about trying to walk along hallway without waking someone up. In the layout and lighting of the set I wanted to convey a sense of unease and tension. The landing is narrow and the bannisters of the stairs cast threatening shadows.
We constructed the base for the sets out of dense polystyrene, which I tend to use as a base for most animation sets as it is a good material for pinning the puppets into. This might be the most difficult set I’ve had to build. Firstly, it had so many dimensions, two staircases and landings that needed to be measured out and fitted together perfectly. The staircases then had to be carpeted with adhesive velvet that needed to be cut to fit, then we had to build railings and bannisters. I also needed to be able to remove one set of stairs to slot into the wasteland set for the transition from that scene to this one and in the second scene this set was used for the whole thing needed to fall apart on screen. We had to do a lot of planning and make sure we had all of the shots we needed from each scene before filming the final destruction.
The third set built for the animated segment was the nursery. This scene is probably the most abstract in the film and deals again with a combination of Laura’s dreams and memories that are difficult to interpret.
With this set we played around with scale again, using a combination of real childhood toys alongside doll’s house furniture and toys that were made to a much smaller scale. I like the strange quality it gives to everything. As we weren’t trying to represent the real world we were able to have a lot of fun with the set and characters for this scene. the Rocking Horse is my favourite puppet, which I will talk about in more detail in a later post. We also created a nightlight effect by cutting stars and crescent moons out of paper and moving it across a spotlight throughout the scene.
The Rocking Horse is one of my favourite puppets because it is so different from any of the other puppets I have made and I spent a really long time trying to get the details just right. As the horse moved on rockers the armature only contains one joint, which is at the neck. The horse’s body and rockers are constructed out of styrofoam which was cut and then sanded. I spent hours sanding the horse’s legs and body to make it look authentic. I sank shiny black beads into the horse’s skull to give him his eyes, then the whole armature was coated in plasticine.
It took a long time to get the details of the horse’s face right. It was important that the character, though mysterious, came across as a benevolent and protective figure. As it doesn’t speak this all needs to be conveyed in the look and the movements of the character.
Doppelganger Chris needed to look like an aged and monstrous version of Chris. He represents a nightmare version of Chris, the embodiment of all of Laura’s relationship anxieties and fears for the future. I constructed the armatures for both Chris and the Doppelganger at the same time so as to keep them in proportion to each other, with Doppelganger being a little taller so as to be dominant in the scene.
Doppelganger Chris was given yellow eyes instead of white, and we used a dirtier skin tone for him. His fingers were thin and spiky, his features more severe and I etched lines into his face to give him a grizzly, wrinkled look. Unfortunately Doppelganger Chris didn’t survive the shoot as we ended up using various parts of his body and costume as replacements for the Chris puppet.
Elysium isn’t a perfect film, but it’s still a piece of work that I’m really proud of. I was experimenting with a lot of different ideas when I wrote the script, exploring dreams, desires and the unconscious. I was really influenced by surrealist animation, particularly the work of Jan Svankmajer, as I was writing my dissertation about him at the time. Alice, his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, was a film that I made a few nods to throughout Elysium.
Elysium was also influenced by other quest stories like The Wizard of Oz and fairytale adaptations such as Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes. I was also influenced by Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life which is one of my favourite films of all time.
The red shoes represent Laura’s spirit or soul. They allowed us to make her present but not visible. The pile of shoes that Chris sees in the Underworld are the souls of the departed, the film ends with us seeing Laura’s soul join the others for eternity. The workers at the Elysium organisation exist between both worlds, they are neither living or dead, so they have bare feet. This is one of a few mysteries that I left unexplained in the film as I wanted it to be dream-like and open to interpretation.
If you have any thoughts or questions about the film, please comment here or contact me through twitter. To find out more about me and my work, please visit my website.
The Hungerwas my first stop-motion animated short, which I made with friends at University. It’s a twisted take on the Red Riding Hood fairytale. It’s an adult take on a children’s story, so we wanted everything to look quite homemade and infantile. I don’t want to spoil the story, but I should warn you that it’s not safe for work.
I had worked on some basic claymation experiments prior to this, but the Big Bad Wolf was my first fully articulated puppet with an armature. I used styrofoam to shape and bulk out the wolf, whilst keeping the puppet light. I gave him large rounded shoulders, and sank the neck into his chest to give him a more hunched appearance. His posture really helped to bring the character to life, as it informed how the puppet would move. The wolf is hunched over as he creeps through the forest, but he is also a comedy character and so he is cumbersome and loud as he stalks Red Riding Hood.
The Wolf has a special place in my heart because he was the first puppet I ever made. I constructed an armature using wire, styrofoam and wooden dowels. I modelled a muscular torso out of styrofoam and rather than attach a neck at the top, I sank it into the chest to give the wolf a hunched and imposing figure. I had to give the armature really big feet to support the weight of the upper body. Unless you are working with rigging, stop motion puppets generally need big feet to support their own weight and to accommodate pins and supports which attach your puppet to the set as you animate. I’d love to work with more sophisticated metal armatures, but they can be expensive.
Once I completed the armature it was covered with grey fleece, which gave the wolf a texture that I really liked. Traditionally the wolf is supposed to be a fearful figure in folklore, but our inversion of the story turned the wolf into Red Riding Hood’s prey. I liked the way the fleece softened the wolf’s image and made him less threatening.
We used paper to provide the wolf’s facial features – teeth and eyes were either glued or pinned on and then swapped between shots to change his expressions. We also used red cloth to create a tongue which was cut to different sizes as we animated it. We used the same method for Red Riding Hood’s facial expressions. I like mixing my media so it was nice to borrow these techniques from paper cut out animation. This swapping technique is a really simple way to create effects in animation and one I employed a great deal on later paper animations, such as Happy Cloud.
We had fun reversing the idea of the Big Bad Wolf, and turned him into the unwitting prey of our Red Riding Hood/Princess character. As the wolf stalks her, he fails to realise that she is luring him into a trap. We wanted to subvert the idea of the damsel in distress. We wanted her to be stronger and more in control than a regular fairytale princess. She knows what she wants and she’s going to get it.
Red Riding Hood kidnaps the Wolf and drags him back to her castle, which was the second set we built for the production, using a combination of fabrics, paper linings and decorations from Doll Houses. Once she has the Wolf entrapped in her room she produces a pair of clippers and begins to shave the unconscious wolf, revealing a man beneath the fur.
The clippers were a puppet in their own right and I like to think of them as another character in the story, because anything you animate has its own life and personality. We produced the effect of the blades moving by creating removable blades of varied lengths that we could alternate in each shot. For ease of animation we made a small pair of clippers for the full sized puppet to hold, and then a larger, moving version in an enlarged puppet hand, which we filmed in extreme close-up. This was one of my favourite shots in the film because of the exaggerated shadow. It has a very B-movie feel in its melodrama.
To create the shaving effect we used large pieces of grey fake fur, which we trimmed between each frame and then manipulated the offcuts to make them travel around the clippers. For the close up shots of Red Riding Hood with the fur flying around, we moved clumps of fur up her arms and over her body whilst also sprinkling more clumps of fur in the background each time we captured a frame. We had to experiment a bit to get it to look right, but those experiments and little challenges are one of the things I love about animation.
Stop motion puppetry is definitely my favourite form of animation. I love the process of crafting a character, designing it and shaping it, figuring out how it’s going to take its first steps. I still have the wolf puppet, in fact he’s the only of my puppets that’s survived the years intact. All of the rest are plasticine and have gradually crumbled and fallen apart.
We had so much fun making this film, especially recording the sound. We recorded the voices in a small booth that was effectively a cupboard. There was a class full of people on the other side of the door and they gave us some very strange looks when we came out as they had no idea what we were doing. By the time we showed the completed animation to our classmates there was quite a lot of anticipation for it, as people had begun to talk about ‘the puppet sex film.’
For me, the film is about more than puppet sex. I like the way that Trey Parker and Matt Stone use extreme and purile humour to satirise. Their work can be shocking, and immature but it’s not just cheap laughs. I was reading Bruno Bettelheim and Angela Carter and I was interested in the psychology of fairytales. The Hunger is about desire and animal instincts. I wanted to play with the idea of the beast within, subverting gender roles and the assumptions we make about archetypal characters. And yes, I also wanted to shock my audience by taking the story in a direction that they wouldn’t expect.
I’ve been writing and making films since childhood. I remember the first time my sister and I got our hands on a friend’s camcorder. We created simple in-camera tricks such as making people disappear and reappear and turn into different objects. It was like performing a magic trick. Inspired by Sesame Street and the Adam and Joe show, my childhood experiments in video progressed to using stuffed animals and toys to recreate dramas and tell stories of my own. In my teenage years, like a typical adolescent, mortality became a fascination for me. I started making campy fake-blood-soaked horror shorts with friends, running around the South Downs screaming, with rusty shears and other improvised weapons.
I can assure you that all of these early films were terrible, but those elements are still present in my work today. I am drawn to the illusion of cinema and the opportunity to create effects. As an animator I enjoy giving life to puppets, toys and inanimate objects, essentially using the same stop/start technique that my sister and I employed to make ourselves disappear from the frame as children. I still love creating horror effects and channel this into experiments with special effects make-up. Horror has taught me how to create tension and suspense, which was a great entry point to understanding how to provoke a range of emotions in an audience.
Leading workshops was something that evolved quite organically for me. I started learning about production and script writing when I joined my local youth theatre. I originally had ambitions to act, but soon became far more enchanted with the world backstage than on it. I got involved in making props and costumes. I started devising and writing material. Then, around age 14, I tried my hand at leading workshops and this is when I was able to get my hands on video cameras again. At first we produced in-camera edited films but then when the group acquired a laptop I started learning how to edit and how to shoot for the edit. I went on to study film, media and photography academically, but it was through the theatre group that my education began, and years later, where I got my first paid work as a workshop leader.
Being part of a community group was not only a huge support to me throughout my childhood but also a creative playground where I was able to learn, collaborate and develop throughout my formative years. Perhaps this is why I try to keep community at the heart of what I do. I believe that film and animation can provide all kinds of people with a creative and positive outlet, to help them develop their own voice in the same way that I did. As such, I enjoy working with different communities and on projects that have a social benefit.
Coming from a background of low budget theatre and filmmaking, I am used to getting my hands dirty on set and occupying several roles at the same time. This hands-on attitude has given me the opportunity to learn about the process of filmmaking from a variety of different perspectives within development, production and post-production. It has also enabled me to experiment with production design, props and puppet-making, special effects makeup and set building.
I am an avid film fan who loves to watch, make and talk about films. I’m a big fan of innovative writers and directors like Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman. I have a passion for film history and silent cinema. I love science fiction, monster movies, fantasy and horror films. I am definitely drawn to the dark side, so filmmakers like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton are a big inspiration as well as animators like Jan Svankmajer, Jiri Trnka, and the late great Ray Harryhausen.
I love animation, especially when it gives me the opportunity to create strange characters. It takes a great deal of patience and attention to detail, but it’s those details that I love to get lost in, like how a character is going to move and perform or what they are going to sound like. Watching your animation come to life is like watching magic happen in front of your eyes. The first time you watch your work back, and see your characters move as if they have a life of their own, it’s incredible. It’s so much fun to introduce new people to animation, and see that same reaction in them.
I have a lot of ambitions – one of them being to build my own production company from the ground up. I’m just starting out on that journey, but I already feel I’ve achieved my most important goal of being able to do something that I love for a living. I am learning every day – about myself, about film and about running my own business. I plan to share these experiences through this blog and hopefully interest and entertain along the way. I’m always open to conversations and opinions, so feel free to comment, critique and join the discussion.
Evan Makes Films 