Catching up here still from the holidays and I wanted to share an interview that Taylor wrapped up last year before the break. I missed meeting Nick Fox-Gieg in person at the Ottawa fest last year but did catch his latest short “The Foxhole Manifesto”. After you wrap up here I recommend heading over to Nick’s site to check that out and the rest of his work. The short he’s in production with now sounds fantastic (info below) and we’ll send out an update when there’s more news on a release. Here’s Taylor with a great behind the scenes look at Nick’s 2006 video “I Wanna be Famous”.
Nick Fox-Gieg
I Wanna be Famous
How were you first exposed to the work of singer/songwriter Jessica Delfino and how did it lead to the making of this short?
Funny story…in May 2005, I was VJ-ing at “Ask the Robot,” a bimonthly variety show that’s held on a boat docked at Chelsea Piers in New York. Jessica performed there too, and “I Wanna Be Famous” just got stuck in my head. A year later, it still wouldn’t go away, so finally I wrote her and asked about making a video—we still haven’t ever met in person.
Were you in charge of all the visual aspects, or was it an across-the-board collaboration?
Yup, I pretty much went away with the audio track and came back with the finished video. It’s a very visual song, though, so in a sense I started out with a script to work from.
Talk about the artists you admire that have made you who you are.
I remember walking into the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in 1999 and getting blindsided by William Kentridge’s “Stereoscope.” Lotte Reiniger was a strong influence on “The Foxhole Manifesto.” Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, and Pierre Hébert have provided inspiration for my realtime graphics work. But, giving it some thought, my biggest influence would have to be “Liquid Television”—as thirteen-year-old kid in West Virginia, I got to watch the pioneers of digital animation as they were just figuring out how their tools worked. Looking back, I find that remarkable.
What do you have hanging in your workspace or sitting on the shelf in books that you go to for inspiration?
I’m nomadic, so my workspace tends to go undecorated, and most of my stuff is in storage. One book I do have lying around at the moment is Animation Unlimited: Innovative Short Films Since 1940, by Liz Faber and Helen Walters.
How long did the project take from start to finish?
The animation for “I Wanna Be Famous” was completed in one week—the project was my own idea, not a commission, so I couldn’t let it eat up any more time. Sound design and a few After Effects tweaks took it up to a month, all told. Time crunch or no, I think it’s the last time I’ll ever animate on fours.
Were you test-driving any new skills or technology here? New stylistic techniques?
I’d been using Flash for years, but I wanted to find a middle ground between the economy of cut-outs and the dauntingly slow pace of fully drawn animation. I think the mix of the two turned out nicely.
Talk about your scholastic background and your professional background. What led you to animation?
I had a chance early exposure to the production side of animation—Derek Lamb and Janet Perlman, from the National Film Board of Canada, came to my town to give a lecture when I was seven. I went to art school at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and CalArts for grad school. Careerwise, though, I feel I became an animator almost by accident. Sometime in 2002, after working in local TV and in theatrical design, I realized that everything I’d been doing for the previous seven years could one way or another be called animation.
What’s your latest opus?
I’m working on a film from a short story by Benjamin Rosenbaum, about an orange (as in the fruit) that’s granted absolute power over the universe. And I’m planning a bigger project, a semi-documentary animation about the guy considered by some to be history’s first computer hacker.
You seem to be a resident of many places. Are you on a Viking-like spree raiding a sequence of artist-rich communities? Or do you flock back and forth from one continent to another with a change of the seasons?
Haha—well, having grown up in a place about four hours’ drive away from everything else, I’m really eager to travel whenever I get the chance.
What percentage of your day job is animation? What percentage of your artistic footprint is animation? Are they the same thing?
Hmm…I would say animation accounts for about three-quarters of each. The other fraction involves designing sound and video projections for live performance—concerts, dance, dramatic theater, that kind of thing.
Regarding your short film Little Bird of Disaster, readers will have to watch the documentary video on your home page to fully appreciate the technique behind your real-time animation-puppeteering performance pieces, but fill me in on a few details – what are the raw materials of your performance, and what instrument do you play them on?
The raw ingredients aren’t too different from the rest of my animation—Flash and a Wacom tablet. The shows are usually run on Isadora, a really useful theatrical video-cueing program. But the basic principles that make the “puppets” work can be put into practice with a lot of different software, including perennial favorite Jitter, free programs like PD, or even (with some clever scripting) Flash itself. As for how I control the graphics, the volume of my voice coming in through the microphone is what made Little Bird of Disaster work. I play piano, and over the past year I’ve been using a MIDI keyboard for control—a bit more old-fashioned, but I enjoy it.
Do you make the short films for an internet audience? For festival screenings? Gallery screenings? Any TV exposure?
Funny you should ask…when I started making short films in the mid-‘90s, I wasn’t aware any of these outlets existed—I was just sitting on the tapes! Things improved when I began to connect with distributors starting in 2001; I’ve been on TV in Canada, Israel, and the Netherlands, screened in the Pompidou Centre, and in my first real film festivals in Ottawa and Rotterdam. But, after a decade of keeping my shorts online, it’s the internet audience that’s become most important—beyond the small amount of money the stuff brings, it’s a nice incentive to realize that there are a couple thousand subscribers waiting for the next film.
Talk about how you hooked up with Jeffrey McDaniel to make “The Foxhole Manifesto”.
An arts organization in LA called NewTown, run by Richard Amromin and Patricia Payne, matched us up. They curated a series of shorts called “Speak/See” in 2006, and paired up a poet and an animator for each.
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