Words: Suchandrika Chakrabarti
Photography: Jannica Honey

Inspired by the natural world, this 25-year-old designer’s beautifully intricate patterns make her textiles and wallpapers true collectors’ items.

Based in Aberdeen, Johanna Basford Designs has been producing hand-printed wallpapers, fabrics and ceramics since 2006. It’s a one-girl show, with 25-year-old Johanna co-ordinating both the financial and creative affairs.

There’s nothing like a little help from your nearest and dearest, though: “I have very tolerant friends and family, who over the years have been accountants, web designers, photographers, models and box packers,” she grins.

Referencing the nature that surrounded her as she grew up on a fish farm in rural Aberdeen, Johanna’s delicate, leaf-like drawings are embellished with flowers and vines that twine together to become dense, baroque-style patterns.

“As I child I scrawled on the walls; on absolutely everything,” she admits sheepishly. “I drove my parents mad. But we weren’t really allowed to watch TV, and I think that helped feed my imagination.”

Running her own business, she confides, is a challenge: “When I first set the company up, I didn’t know just how much time it would take up. Getting that balance between the two sides is a difficult thing.” She must be doing something right though, as she won the Shell Livewire Award for Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2006, as well as securing a welcome loan from The Prince’s Trust.

Although the design side is Johanna’s passion, she’s enjoying the independence that comes from being self-employed. “You’re in charge of the direction your work is going in,” is her take on it. “The minute you start working for someone else, it can be quite restrictive.”

Just a few months after graduating with a first in Printed Textiles from Dundee of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Johanna was already attending the glitzy opening of DKNY’s new Bond Street store – freshly kitted out in her wallpaper, after she won the New Designers showcase at London Fashion Week, fittingly in association with Wallpaper* magazine.

Apart from her products being stocked from Aberdeen to Brighton, she also takes on commissions, one recent example being a handmade set of limited-edition silk-screened labels for local brewery Brewdog.
Her one piece of advice? Don’t get chickenpox just before your Award photo-shoot: “They’re going to have to Photoshop that out,” Johanna notes wryly. “Oh, and if everyone else is jumping on a bandwagon, do the exact opposite. Carve out a niche, differentiate yourself from the crowd, and dare to be different.” We’d expect nothing less from our Wildcard winner.

www.johannabasford.com

Words: Claire Spencer

As influenced by film as he is by photography, 24-year-old Hal has made an art out of his obsession, using still images to put a cinematic spin on the everyday world.

“I’m not sure obsession is a technique, but if it is, that’s how I’d define my process,” reflects Hal Sear. “I get wrapped up in the photographs, trying to re-stage a sensation over and over. Making the images is like day-dreaming; I go through the motions but my mind is somewhere else.” Hal’s photos tend to focus on domestic interiors, but with a theatrical edge that moves them out of the ordinary.

Hal won the South Square Trust Award earlier this year, and can now add the 4Talent Award for Photography to the tally. But it’s more than just an accolade to the young photographer.

“I’m just starting to develop a new project, so it means a lot that to me that the work I completed earlier in the year has been recognised,” explains Hal. “It’s important to me that a new audience gets to see my work.” His old audience was connected with his work at the Royal College of Art, where he’s just completed an MA. At the time, he feared that the course would limit his individuality as an artist, but as it happens, it embraced those qualities.

This is just as well, as Hal’s influences range beyond the confines of other photographers. “Film is a strong influence: screen beauty, or the screen enigma, interests me,” he expands. “Also contemporary French directors like Christophe Honore and Francois Ozon, and independent American film-makers such as Gus Van Sant and Gregg Araki.”

There is a certain disjointed narrative in his work: ‘Two Shadows’, for example, sees a strange juxtaposition between light and shade, memory and reality, warm and cold. Hal agrees: “I think my images are more like broken stories. Every picture is seductive, suggesting more than it reveals.”

Part of that storytelling process if reflected in the colour palette he uses; a faded brightness associated with dreams and memories. Hal acknowledges that he’s particularly interested in themes such as longing, and chooses the colours to intensify the audience’s reaction.

“The camera always lies,” he declares. “There’s a strong personal element to what I do, but it’s ultimately lost in the pictures. They are fantasy.” Arguably, our fantasies do as much to define our reality as the world around us, another theme integral to his work and illustrated with a recurrent isolated figure.

“He’s so different from me, yet at the same time familiar,” says Hal. “Within the image this kind of ‘dual’ persona is created, similar to a self-portrait, but with a barrier between us.” Finding the artist in the art can be difficult, and Hal claims that this has been important to viewers of his work to-date. “But then,” he concludes, “autobiography is the biggest fiction of all.”

hal.sear@network.rca.ac.uk

Words: Claire Spencer
Photography: Sanna Charles

Littlenobody animation

The 28-year-old animation duo who go by the name Littlenobody share their passion for fabled worlds filled with magical creatures.

“I was actually on my first holiday in a decade when the announcement was made,” begins Liam Brazier, one half of the Littlenobody duo. “I spent the next twenty minutes excitedly calculating time difference and negotiating a Turkish keyboard to email a smile back to Karen.”

Over the past year their animations have made it onto big screens at film festivals worldwide, and this recognition is one step closer to making a long-term career out of their craft. “What Cassandra Saw being BBFC certified and put onto 35mm for cinema screening was insane, and a real privilege,” enthuses Karen. “It’s our first short, and I’m so glad it got the life and the audience I dreamt it could have.”

Their stunning films are a product of everything to pair grew up loving and absorbing, and have several common threads running through them. “We both love the charm of children’s storytelling and fables,” asserts Karen. “We want to make a world for our characters to inhabit. I very much like the idea of an unseen world, magic, and creatures.”

Both are passionate about the ongoing learning curve of the animation process. “Every venture seems a departure from the last,” believes Liam. “I’m terrified that I’d become eternally bored of what I love if we just repeated ourselves, as well as wanting to try something new.”

As such, the media that they use tend to vary, as do their methods. Karen explains: “Sometimes when we’re coming up with a story, one of us will say, ‘Ooh, cookie-cutters stop-motion,’ and the medium will lead the story. Other times, we go full-steam-ahead and worry about the practicalities later. I think I have a more holistic approach than Liam. He loves to get lost in the details.”

Both halves of the Littlenobody partnership find their inspiration from similar places – directors Gondry, Burton and Gilliam to name but a few – which helps cement their working relationship. But it’s their differences that really complement each other.

“Karen helps me actually get stuff done,” laughs Liam. “When I met her, I was up at six and back at eight every day, getting sunburnt by the monitor glare – and I hadn’t picked up a pencil in over a year. That’s truly shameful thing for someone who at one point wouldn’t have minded if his hands were replaced by a giant 2B pencil.”

He adds that his creative partner inspired him to get back into creativity as no-one else had. For her part, Karen believes that the animation process would be much lonelier without Liam. “I’m more certain that an idea will work when we both agree, and we push and drive each other to complete projects,” she says. “We are each other’s audience.”

www.littlenobody.com

Words: Ije Ndukwe
Illustration: Chris Dickason
Buy Issue 10 here

It’s the spectre that hangs over programme-making; the veiled process that turns endless footage into coherent narrative. But how authoritative is the edit suite? Meet three editors who between them have cut some of the industry’s most challenging genres.

Documentary Case Study: Louis Theroux

Stuart Cabb has directed and produced a range of films fronted by Louis Theroux, including Louis And The Nazis and Louis Theroux: Behind Bars, which attracted nearly 6 million viewers. He explains how he uses the edit suite to “create a heightened version of the story.”

For me, the edit suite tells you what your film is really about. When working on Louis Theroux, we tend to follow experiences through Louis’ eyes. This means that during the edit, you have to find the narrative when there really isn’t one. It’s rather like a puzzle. If you don’t crack it, it’s completely demoralising.

The prison [Louis Theroux: Behind Bars] was hard because people are always coming and going. So if anyone perks your interest, you hope the next time you see them something new would emerge and then the edit hones in on that story.

One funny thing I noticed in the edit is that every time I walked through the lower ground floor of San Quentin prison, the prisoners would call me everything from ‘English ponce’ to ‘Gimp boy’. ‘Camera wimp’ was the favourite. After several weeks of hearing that in the edit, you somehow feel less of a man for not being able to turn around with the confidence to express your masculinity to them, knowing that they’re locked behind a cell door.

We did a casino film [Louis Theroux: Gambling In Las Vegas]. There was this woman, Martha, who was 80 years old and had lost $4m. Every time Louis met her, you got to know her a bit better, so the audience felt they were on a bit of a journey. The edit brought that together, like there was a continuing narrative.

In all the edits I’ve ever done, we have always played with structure more than anything else. We know the characters are good, we know the story is there, but we play with how to structure it so it’s fascinating and unpredictable. We start the story in a place you don’t expect.

The very first thing we do is a synch pool in the first week. Everything that we think is any good, we quickly cut together. That usually runs at around five to six hours. We watch that through all in one go, and straight away the characters that are really interesting leap out.

It’s great to cut all the best stuff out of your film, see it and say, ‘The life of my film is here.’ The worst thing to do is to walk in with a paper edit. Generally you lose the life of the story that way, because you’re trying to predict it before you edit it.

You have to remember what the story feels like the first time you edit it, and log it purposefully in your brain: I’m horrified by that quote; I’m shocked by that experience; that makes me feel emotional. You have to remember these things, because in about five weeks time you’re going to completely distrust it. You can’t over-think it. It’s like romance. If you have to give yourself reasons to stay with someone, as opposed to really wanting to, it doesn’t work. It’s the same in an edit. Your gut tells you when you’ve got a great moment.

Comedy Case Study:
Tonightly and The Sunday Night Project

Spencer Doane has nearly twenty years’ experience editing live TV shows. His most recent projects include Tonightly, The Sunday Night Project and 8 Out Of 10 Cats.

You edit the show in the way you think is funny. Then everyone comes in and puts their tuppence in. You hope that it’s still funny, but I don’t think anyone knows in the end. Each stage is hopefully enhancing it. You have to believe the process will achieve the results.

As the editor, you become really close to the show because you’ve watched it a hundred times over the past few days. How the hell do you know if it’s funny? You don’t. The people on The Sunday Night Project think I only like knob jokes.

It’s important to have someone make a decision who’s not caught up in the day-to-day process. It’s easy to get swept away with an idea, and because you’ve just seen it so many times you can’t be objective about it.

You have to do the best you can, but you can’t be precious about your work. I’ve been thrown out of an edit-suite before. The truth is, if you don’t do what the Series Producer wants, you won’t last very long.

There’s so much more to being an editor than just cutting things together. With Tonightly, I watch the first part of the show and have a system of marking footage. That stuff goes straight into the edit. Jason [Mansford] sometimes says, “Hang on, I’ve just thought of a new joke.” They’re literally coming up with jokes as they’re recording it. So to make the edit faster, I have an assistant marking points where anything was taken out or where they stopped and started again.

Tonightly is quite good because you could always save a joke and put it in the next day. This will happen less on a weekly show, because obviously the material isn’t new anymore. All these things get marked, so you can find it later.

One of the hardest things to do is make live and as-live shows seem and look live. The last thing you want to see is an edit and go, ‘Urgh, that was weird,’ which I see all the time. It’s something you can only learn by doing it. Three years ago, I didn’t have those skills at all. I didn’t know I didn’t have them; I thought I could edit anything. Three years on, I realise it’s a difficult thing to master.

Advertising Case Study: KFC, Vodafone and Pantene

Jonathan Pearson is an award-winning director who’s shot commercials for the likes of KFC, Pantene and Vodafone. He’s currently working on an online drama project.

You make a film three times. Once when you write it, once when you shoot it and once when you edit it.

With commercial editing, you’re working with an agency with their own agenda. There was one brand who, after we shot their advert, came to us with a completely different script and said, “Now make this film.” We had to use a lot of voiceover and pictures and edit around the person speaking, so you couldn’t see them speaking. Fortunately I’d covered it with a lot of cameras, so had a lot of footage.

One of the things you learn when you work for a production company is to pick your battles. The nature of our work is that someone is paying for it. There are always going to be people putting in their ten-pence worth. You have to get used to that. There’s no point getting into deadlock over it.

With editing, some things are so fine that either of two options can work. But then conversely, one little cut can make all the difference. There’s no rule of thumb when judging whether something is funny or looks great. You just need to know what it’s in your head and think, ‘Is that what I was aiming for?’

So many times I’ve shot a film in one way, but gone a different route in the edit. In the edit you can explore other avenues, but you need to know what you’re aiming for because every frame counts. Every second is like gold. You’ve got something like 60 seconds to get the message across.

Sometimes you get attached to one tiny little shot that you’re so proud of, and you have to discipline yourself to let go. Sometimes full scenes need to be chopped out. You have to be ruthless. It goes back to the idea of making a film for the third time. You have to approach it with fresh eyes.

The best adverts are great films. So you need to have a good sense of story-telling, and understand how narrative works. Also a good sense of pace and rhythm is important. You can completely muck up an edit by jarring it at the wrong time. Sometimes I’ve watched a rough-cut and it’s like, ‘Oh God, that’s horrible. Why did they cut there?’ It’s like a needle screeching across a record.

Words: Nick Carson
Images: Courtesy of Framestore CFC & Ninja Theory

They were once a printmaker, a NASA shuttle engineer, a sound technician and a software developer. Nibbled by the CGI bug, they changed tack - and left in their wake the likes of Monsters Inc, Batman Begins and The World is Not Enough. Now they’re giving something back: 4Talent magazine grills the battle-hardened tutors at Escape Studios about the many facets of computer graphics.

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Escape’s manifesto is simple: “to provide the global computer graphics community with the best training, technology and talent in the world.” While in-house tutor and recently-crowned Maya Master Lee Danskin insists that there’s “no such thing as a 3D industry” per se, one thing that film, TV, games and commercials share is a voracious thirst for CGI production talent. It’s just the way it’s applied that differs.

Character design

“Character design is about injecting life. You may not be able to draw, but if you can sculpt then it’s much easier,” suggests Escape’s Character guru Nick Savy, whose proudest spot on his showreel is an indistinguishable 3D stunt-double for Christian Bale in Batman Begins.

Playing God with the caped crusader may sound like a small boy’s dream - and Nick admits he’s spent his life sketching comic books and cartoons - but he’s keen to point out that character building, like animation, involves a huge amount of repetition. Woe betides a rigger who puts a bone out of place.

“You have to be precise when building your rig. I once purposely made my students do a rig wrong, and then re-build it,” he smiles. “They were very pissed off, but that repetition is so important - for Batman we did 62 versions of the rig and 38 iterations of the muscle system.” It’s all-too-tempting to quip that character building builds character - although you may well risk repetitive strain disorder in the process.

Nick’s route has been something of a rambling one. When in a band in the mid-80s he became obsessed with synthesizers, mixed some tracks in the studio and ended up working as a sound engineer for five years. It was helping his brother on a corporate video in ‘92 that first broke him into his current trade: “I learned animation; he paid me with a computer,” he states simply. “I’d never touched computers ‘til then.”

When Sega were setting up a new studio, Nick managed to weasel his self-dubbed “crappy” ‘folio in front of them. One small segment made the difference: “A random animation of a psychedelic hippy. He had a pointy hat with a sphere on the end, surrounded by Saturn’s rings. When he bent forward it rotated, dangling in time - it was the secondary animation that caught their eye.”

His seat-of-the-pants journey makes for exhausting listening. He worked in games for five years; was interviewed for Glassworks while his wife was giving birth; eventually became head of the FMV (full motion video) dept, and then moved to into commercials.

After three more years he ended up at Pinewood Studios as a modeller. “They asked if anyone had experience of rigging, and ended up making me Head of Characters. Then I was taken on at Double Negative to work on Batman, where I peaked.”

His first film project, it was a hefty 8-month stint. “By the end I was bored crapless,” he chuckles. “But it’s the only one I actually got my name on the credits: usually there’s a big turnaround of staff - lots of freelancers. People get missed off.”

As the story goes, director Chris Nolan was dubious that a digital Batman would be convincing enough on the big screen, and wanted as much stunt work in camera as possible. Nick was part of a team that set about creating screen tests to be projected next to live action. Christian Bale was body-scanned in full costume, and then the resulting 3D model was equipped with a complex rig, coloured with a bespoke shading system and key-frame animated - no motion capture was used. Thankfully, Nolan was impressed.

“You’re interpreting the world into 3D - not the mechanics, but how something moves,” Nick concludes. “Modelling and skinning is very artistic: how the crease works when an arm bends; how material crumbles under the armpit; how the muscle inflates. It’s how it looks, not necessarily how it works. Then it’s up to the animator to make it move.”

Animation

Seeing animated characters interact with humans in ‘80s toon-gangster flick Who Framed Roger Rabbit sparked creative impulses in Jeff Pratt, an engineer at the time. He opted for a change, went to art school for four years, and fortuitously ended up at the doors of Pixar just as they were gearing up for a second run at Toy Story.

“They’d had story problems, and it was on hold,” he recalls. “At the time I was the fourteenth animator hired; they thought I’d be one of the last. There were 40 in the end.” In such a large team, and with CGI animation requiring increasingly realistic movement, an aptitude in engineering helped him specialise.

“I like the technical aspects,” he admits, small surprise given he started out tinkering with space shuttles for NASA. “Take the spring in Slinky Dog – I was the only animator that could understand how to make it work convincingly, using sine waves and so on.”

And while the traditional process of sketching scenes frame by frame has been replaced by tweaking rigs and walk cycles, roles are also split differently. “For hand-drawn animation, a team is assigned to a certain character to make sure it’s drawn consistently – when you’re working on computer, that’s all defined already,” he points out.

“On a production like Toy Story or Monsters Inc there’s a team of up to 40 animators – you can’t have two animators on one character while the other 38 sit around twiddling their thumbs. You work on the shot as a whole.”

With the whole team dipping into a central pool of characters, it’s essential to get the puppet controls set up properly in the first place. “A modeller and a rigger will work closely with the animators to develop a character and test it,” confirms Jeff. “The more the animator knows about rigging, the better: it helps to understand the whole process.”

Fundamental to all forms of animation is the walk cycle, and as with the character rig, this will be crafted first. “A team of animators will spend two weeks honing it down to minute details, and then it’s used by everyone in production,” he reveals. “You’re always improving: walk cycles are unique to each character, and help to define personality.”

With rival studios pushing each other’s standards higher by the day, it’s crucial to stay across all new developments – and Pixar provides its animators with bespoke preparatory software that’s updated for each production. So with a clutch of seminal CGI masterpieces behind him, what were the peaks?

“For me, milestones are technical ones,” he confesses, perhaps unsurprisingly given his background: “the fur in Monsters Inc; the clothes in The Incredibles. It’s getting close to absolute realism now: motion water works pretty well off-the-shelf; clothing still has its bugs but it’s pretty good.”

So how important were those four years studying tomes of art history, traditional drawing, photography, colour theory and the like? “It’s useful, but none of that is required for animation,” Jeff admits. “A polished 20-second piece will get you a job, not whether you can draw.”

Games

“At some point in the future, the visual quality of Film and Games will be indistinguishable,” foresees Simon Fenton, ex-Sony Computer Entertainment and now creator and tutor of the centre’s Games courses. “But there’s a real demarcation of roles. In film, you could just be a character modeller. In games, until recently a senior artist would do character, environment, assets, everything. Now those roles are starting to separate.”

Equipped with a Fine Art degree in Painting & Printmaking, Simon might not seem like the archetypal gamer – although it was the printmaking process that first got him interested in mechanical reproduction, not so far away from rendering thousands of frames to produce an animation sequence.

“That was 15 years ago, when silicon graphics machines were the price of a house,” he recalls fondly. “The only way to get access to the software was as a runner at a post-production house. So that’s what I did. I taught myself Alias and Softimage in the evenings: I was actually sleeping in the studio to get access to the machines.”

At a similar time, Lee Danskin was starting his career at Alias Research, putting the wheels in motion for the first ever version of Maya. With a visual effects background – he went on to co-found Smoke & Mirrors 3D, before becoming Deputy Head of 3D at influential London post-house MPC – he speaks with a helicopter view.

“Yes, the finished products are converging, but the way you apply tools in the pipeline is very different,” he reasons: clearly the language of a man who’s dealt with budgets and workflows as well as the creative coalface. “You’ll never have to master camera tracking in games, or compositing – they talk about tri-stripping, and how many texels you have.”

Creatively, an understanding of film is useful: “The language of cinematography will come into gaming,” Lee admits. “They’re starting to apply the process of a real-world camera to a virtual camera, so you’re not always bumping into walls jerkily. But you’ll never have to reverse-engineer a virtual camera as you do in the effects industry.”

Particularly with the growth of hi-def consoles, there’s never been higher demand for stunning 3D game graphics – and Simon asserts that the volume of work has quadrupled in recent years. “Studios are outsourcing to India and China to meet the volume, but this can be an unhappy experience if the quality isn’t up to scratch,” he goes on. “As a junior artist in the UK you have to hit the ground running, specialise, and raise your game to make it worth paying you more.”

Win £10,000 of animation training >

Words: Claire Spencer
Images: Courtesy of BAA

Animation in the UK is constantly subject to change. Always up for a challenge, the British Animation Awards (BAA) have tried to keep pace: we chat to some of 2008’s talented crop to gauge the state of the UK scene.

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You don’t need super-sensitive radar to pick up that at a time when computer-aided animation can be produced so quickly, slower techniques have fallen out of favour with many major studios.

This general trend continues despite of the efforts of studios like Aardman, and major film-makers like Tim Burton, who have continued to reap success with audiences through the tried-and-tested methods of stop-motion and replacement. Their success is encouraging, as it shows a real willingness on the part of global audiences to accept animation as a multi-faceted medium: so long as you have the scripts to back-up your chosen technique. And the popularity of ads like Sony Bravia’s Play-Doh, winner of the Commercial Craft and Commercial Direction categories at 2008’s BAAs, suggests that even the biggest global brands can harness the value in variety.

As such, many animators see the BAAs as a useful yardstick to gauge the UK scene. Aardman director Luis Cook praises Britain’s current crop of animators: “The UK, to my mind, produces some of the most original and interesting animation in the world.” He should know, having both won the Craft Award and been a runner-up in the Best Short Film category.

“It’s quite disparate, ranging from kids’ shows to commercials, short films to music promos. Every two years the BAAs bunch it all together, get it screened around the country and then celebrate it with an awards ceremony.” Luis stresses the face-to-face aspect of these kinds of meet-ups as key in what can be a lonely industry: “It also gives animation folk the opportunity to surface and say hello to each other which is great as we don’t get out much.”

In mid-March, this year’s finalists were invited to attend the ceremony at the BFI South Bank. But winning and losing seem to be alien concepts to those involved.

“It’s weird to think about this ceremony as a competition,” muses Tibor Banoczki, a runner-up in the Student Film category. “Who do I compete with? We are really different directors with different tastes and approaches. It’s like a strange Olympic Games where every kind of sport competes with one another. It would be impossible to decide which category was better.”

This attitude is typical of animators, particularly as compared to industries like music or film, where auteur culture can attract hefty egos intent on hogging the limelight. Animation is usually more collaborative, with its devotees seeing themselves as sharing a common passion.

The animators we spoke to believed that animation’s current strengths revolve around its diversity as an industry, which allows animators from all areas to come together and enjoy each other’s work. An event like the BAAs is an ideal opportunity to get the thoughts of a variety of animation talent, and that’s exactly what we’ve done, hunting down insider tips and tricks from the finalists.

Craft

Luis Cook’s comically macabre piece, The Pearce Sisters, was a worthy winner of the Craft Award. The piece tells the tale of two charmingly grotesque sisters, whose desire for human contact leads them down a slightly grisly path. The process for producing the piece was, in true Aardman style, painstaking in its precision and attention to detail – and not a piece of clay in sight. Cook and his team started off by animating the blank characters and the set in 3D, before printing out the frames and animating the details in 2D. Both strands were then matched up in After Effects to achieve a hand-drawn finish. It took 18 months to complete.

The worthy runners-up were Ian Mackinnon with Adjustment – his combination of flip-book animation and live action – and Joanna Quinn with Dreams and Desires: Family Ties, showcasing her refinement with deceptively complex pencil-on-paper animation. Ian’s film follows a close relationship as it degenerates in a world where the line between an artist’s animation and live-action ‘reality’ has become increasingly indistinct.

We grilled both Ian and Luis for their views on what it takes to be a successful animator in the modern market.

Both parties assert that inspiration for their work comes from a wide variety of sources – within animation alone, Luis cites everyone from Philip Guston and Saul Steinberg to Pee-Wee Herman as having had an impact on the way he works.

For The Pearce Sisters, he did a lot of research into outsider art, particularly St Ives artists Ben Nicholson and Albert Wallis. The resulting rough-around-the-edges effect frames the tale perfectly.

Ian, who graduated from his Masters course 18 months ago, has found plenty of mutual inspiration in classmates and colleagues. “We keep in touch,” he says. “Collaboration is so important; there’s a real community element.”

Luis agrees, asserting that the industry couldn’t survive without that sense of community. “A smart director simply surrounds himself with people far more talented than himself – writers, editors, designers, animators, and sound people. He pulls it all together by keeping everyone happy with money and cake and then takes all the credit at the end,” he chuckles.

Luis’ journey from student to animator has been a varied one, passing through Berkshire College of Art and Middlesex Polytechnic before becoming a freelance illustrator and teacher. Subsequently, he produced pieces for the BBC and Royal College of Art (RCA) before becoming part of the Aardman family.

“I never intended to be an animation person; it was an accident really,” he muses. “However, as I was working as an illustrator I obviously drew a lot, so a friend of mine threw me in at the deep end and got me to work on a series for the BBC called Small Objects of Desire. That got me into the idea of moving illustration, so I applied to the RCA and VSO at the same time. VSO didn’t get back to me, so I ended up doing animation.”

Ian is also an RCA alumnus, but his path to the BAAs had a more technical base, kicking off with a degree in Computer Animation – which involved a great deal of mathematics. “That opened up a lot of ideas to me,” he recalls, suggesting that the conceptual end often comes first for him as a result.

“With Adjustment, the medium definitely inspired the story,” he admits. Indeed, the two are inextricably interlinked – the animation is the story.

From Luis’ point of view, the industry has a way of restoring balance, just when it seems as though one medium is reigning supreme. “I think it ebbs and flows. A few years ago we thought 2D was being killed by computers, but it seems to be coming back as a response to the masses of CGI features. Maybe it’s more of a cross-fertilisation. All these ways of working seem to reinvent themselves, forming a collage of old and new technologies.”

There may seem to be less sand animation, or oil-on-glass, such as Clive Walley was making in the early 1990s, in the mainstream in 2008. But rather like the winklepickers, tank-tops and drainpipe jeans of decades gone by, just when you think a trend’s been rightly ditched in the dustbin of history, suddenly it’s everywhere again, perhaps under a new name, or more interestingly, having evolved into a slightly more complex beast.

Short Film

Osbert Parker seized the award for Best Short Film firmly in both hands with his technically-precise masterpiece, Yours Truly. Using a combination of miniature 3D environments and camera-manipulated magazines and movie stills, Osbert has created a thrillingly dark tale of love and murder.

His is a fine example of how to use stop-motion technique to its full effect, as the slightly awkward, jerky movements impart an air of film noir to the proceedings.

The equally compelling runners-up were Elizabeth Hobbs with The Old, Old, Very Old Man, and the aforementioned Pearce Sisters. Elizabeth plumped for watery blue ink on white tiles, inspired by the images of Charles I on the Delftware at the British Museum: “I couldn’t have made the piece in any other way,” she asserts.

Alongside Craft, the award for Best Short Film is one of the most highly-regarded at the BAAs. Elizabeth Hobbs shares how it feels to be recognised in such a category. “I was surprised and delighted,” she smiles. “I often feel a little bit outside the animation industry because I work mostly on my own at home, only really emerging to have a drink with my producer by the canal, or to do the sound design at Fonic. Having invested so much in a film and persuaded other people to do the same, it’s nice to have the film noticed.”

The variety within even a single category emphasises the varied backgrounds that these animators have. Elizabeth, like Luis, started her journey as an illustrator. “I was writing and making artist’s books and prints, and developed the desire to make the narratives work over time. I started by making flip-books and Jacob’s Ladder books, and then took it to the next level by borrowing a camera and making two films using fuzzy felt,” she recalls.

This eventually led her in 1998 to a postgraduate degree in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, where she started to make films using the familiar materials from her printmaking days. However, Elizabeth’s different background and approach makes her consider the process of animation in a slightly different light. “I have the feeling that the best animations come from single-minded, slightly bonkers people working on their own in the dark,” she laughs. “But I do appreciate that it is slightly different for adverts, pop videos and features.” Some types of animation do lend themselves to solo flight, and Elizabeth’s delicate techniques are among them. Ultimately, it comes down to preference, media, and how much you are willing to undertake.

Cutting Edge

This category is perhaps one of the most important, as it represents the crème de la crème of the industry’s most daringly innovative artists. Semiconductor’s Magnetic Movie was the overall winner: shot at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory in California, this stunning short film unleashes itself on reality, exploring magnetic fields by bringing them into a dimension that we can sense and appreciate.

Set to a backdrop of NASA scientists discussing their techniques, Magnetic Movie is a marvellous marriage of sound-controlled CGI and 3D compositing.

The runners-up in this category were Osbert Parker’s Yours Truly, and Interstellar Stella, produced by AL and AL. The latter sees a child model exploring the mystery of herself and her contrasting lifestyle via the advertising stills in which she’s featured. The film is a visually-stunning combination of high definition live action and 3D/2D CGI composited video. As one might expect, the techniques demonstrated by all the finalists were quite extraordinary, making it incredibly difficult to narrow it down to a single winner.

Getting in at the ground floor, we spoke to winners Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor, finding again warm words on the subject of diversity in animation: “The scope of the awards has definitely opened up the field of what is considered animation,” Joe notes. Things that were once products of the underground can use the BAAs to emerge into the mainstream – Magnetic Movie itself would not look out of place as an advertisement, and the techniques it showcases have limitless potential. However, both Ruth and Joe consider themselves to be artists over animators, and Magnetic Movie was the result of introducing time and space into their art. AL and AL also have a background in Fine Art, which they studied at St. Martin’s School of Art, graduating in 2001.

Like many of their contemporaries, the idea came before the medium, but the media bring ideas of their own. For their next project, Ruth and Joe are working on a multi-screen installation drawing on the movement of the sun and earth – still animation, but approached in a completely different, more interactive way. Of course, comments-enabled video-sharing sites like YouTube have provided a platform from which the artists can interact with the audience if they choose to do so. But is it a good idea?

“It’s nice to establish a dialogue,” admits Ruth, “and we’ve always aimed to get our work out to people. We released material on a DVD in 2001, and this is just another way of achieving that effect, only faster.”

It doesn’t seem to have harmed their success, although several of the animators we spoke to admitted to having had their hands burned by particularly harsh audience feedback – in such an subjective artform, with so much time and effort invested, criticism can cut deep.

“To an extent, you have to make up your own rules,” Joe asserts. “You have to bring yourself into everything you do, and you have to be willing to spend a lot of time on it. It’s probably one of the most time-consuming things in the world.”

As such, he warns against rushing to get your work out there for its own sake. “Don’t expect it all now – just work through your ideas, work hard, and the results are their own reward.”

Student Film

As the most grass-roots of the awards on offer, it is in the Student Film category that we may peer into animation’s future. “I think it’s good for people to collectively recognise achievements within the industry, as new standards can be set making for better things to come,” asserts George Gendi, the creator of Pingpongs, a runner-up in the category.

“Awards ceremonies also do a pretty good job in bringing everyone in the industry together in the same place at the same time. Everywhere you look you see someone you’ve met or slightly recognise. I think to give awards is to say that this is what people are enjoying at the moment, but it also highlights the direction in which things are going.”

The winners of the Student Film award (and joint winners of the Public Choice Film Award) were Tom Brown and Daniel Grey, with t.o.m., the uncomfortably curious tale of a young boy’s unusual daily routine. Originally produced for their final year project at the International Film School of Wales, the plot revolves around Little Tom’s decision to remove his clothes in order to get out of a day at school.

Using the 2D frame-by-frame effect on the computer, Tom and Daniel have demonstrated how truly flexible animation can be if you’re willing to put the hours in. Short-cuts could have been taken, but the resulting piece sympathises with the young protagonist in a way that a hastily-constructed Flash movie never could.

The runners-up in the category were Pingpongs and Milk Teeth, and we spoke to their creators, George Gendi and Tibor Banoczki, to see how they feel about their future as animators.

Also using a mixed-media technique, Pingpongs deals with the intimacy of relationships in an easily accessible manner, which is undoubtedly what has brought it to the attention of the BAA board. “Its selection affirmed for me that there are certain aspects of the film that are really strong,” George says cordially. “Ultimately, making work that lots of people can enjoy is very important to me.” This represents one of the greatest strengths of the BAAs – by recognising the quality of the work being made by students, or anyone who is at the beginning of their journey into animation, it encourages them to continue working towards their goals.

Tibor on the other hand combined photo-realistic 3D backgrounds with 2D paper cut-out characters to create the eerily tense Milk Teeth. The lack of dialogue is a masterstroke, as it sets the scene for the slightly creepy young boy who follows his elder sister to a secret rendezvous one night, and everything that transpires as a result. “We didn’t start with the story,” he recalls. “The first things we wrote down were the character of the place; the atmosphere. After that we started to think about the human characters and the plot. The medium just came after that. It was a long process to find the right visual word for the film.” He also highlights the importance of his Hungarian roots on his work – inspiration comes from life, not just from art.

As the category title would suggest, all of the finalists are recent students. Tom studied animation at the International Film School of Wales, whereas co-director Daniel studied Fine Art at the University of Wales before enrolling on the same course. Tibor graduated from Moholy-Nagy Arts University in Budapest, and more recently attended the NFTS in London, with Milk Teeth as his graduating film. So, how do the bright hopes of animation characterise the industry facing them today? Nominees in other categories have identified genres that have been less popular in recent times, but like his contemporaries, George is not too worried about what lies ahead.

“Although some sub-genres have become less popular, they can’t be replaced and they can always be found. As long as we make an effort to look for what we like if the mainstream isn’t living up to expectations, then there will always be variety, and nothing will totally die unless technology goes backwards.” Tibor agrees, and asserts that as long as animators care about the message they are putting across, the medium and its surrounding techniques will fall into place.

“Keep your talent busy,” asserts Tibor. “It’s important to have talent, but it’s equally important to keep on working. If you finish a film, start another one. It doesn’t matter what kind of film it is, or whether you have money. Just keep your mind and hands busy.”

The 4Talent Awards 2008 are now open: across 20 categories, get your work judged by Channel 4 commissioners and the producers who supply them.

Categories are short doc, long doc, dramatic writing, dramatic performance, directing, comedy writing, comedy performance, presenting, on-air radio, off-air radio, music, music for production, music video, innovation, multi-platform, animation, journalism, photography, multi-talented and the mysterious wildcard award.

channel4.com/4talentawards