THE ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 4 Theatrical
Dave Carter
Animator, “Psychotown” (2008)
Interviewer: Taylor Jessen
Date: 4/6/2008
Via phone from Australia
Animation Show: I’m talking to Dave Carter, the creator of Pyschotown. And the first
question I have to ask you, Dave, not just because it affects your process as an animator but because it affects this very phone call, is that you are deaf. You have a cochlear implant. Can you talk about the extent of your deafness? How is your hearing now? And when did you first hear?
Dave Carter: Well, I didn’t hear anything until I was eight. So nearly up to then I was pretty much living in complete silence. And so ultimately that’s kind of had an effect on the way I see the world and obviously everything is so visual. And it still very much – even if I’ve got the implant nowadays. Yeah, so I guess it’s programmed this sort of visual orientation, way of seeing things.
AS: So I guess you learned to lip-read from an early age.
DC: That’s right, yeah. I never learned sign language, so – because my mother decided that her mission was going to be – that would ostracise me from the real world so she insisted that I learn to lip read. So yeah, that’s been my main mode of communication. And lip reading has sort of paid off in a good way because I’m pretty good at lip syncing because I can tell when it’s not right when I’m animating it.
AS: You have a real clear speaking voice, all things considered, so how did you get to
where you are now? Was there a lot of therapy involved?
DC: Well actually the story goes that I, when I was diagnosed as being deaf, I also have dyspraxia, which is a condition where you are unable to speak. So I was theoretically a mute, and so the doctors had told my mother that I would never be able to speak and we’d have to utilize sign language. But my mom was pretty much in denial and considered me to be perfect in her way, and so she insisted that I would go to a special school. And she tracked down schools all over the world where they had programs to
teach children with dyspraxia, not necessarily deafness but those who have motor control problems and mine was concerning the lips. And so she took me to Holland when I was three years old. So I was there for a few months, and then we started making progress, and so theoretically I started speaking Dutch. So they decided that it would be better if I went to Canada, so from then on I went to school in Ottawa. We picked up the program in Canada and Mom had to teach me speech therapy daily three times a day for thirteen years. So that’s pretty much why I can talk now, because of my mother’s persistence in teaching me.
AS: Are you usually comfortable on the phone? Or is it ever at all awkward?
DC: Yeah. I’m just used to reading people’s faces as they talk, and it feels like you are talking to this wall and so that’s why I kind of maybe freeze up. Yeah, I don’t normally have long conversations, don’t talk for extended periods of time. If I talk on the phone, it’s more or less just getting the dates, time and place, where to meet friends.
AS: So I guess the big question is: what’s your overall philosophy about sound in your
animation work?
DC: It’s always secondary. Obviously, my stuff has been very visual-based and the comedy is pretty much gag-driven, so ultimately the sound is pretty much supplementing the gags. I think that sound is paramount to animation because it grounds it into a reality. Without sound it’s just complete fantasy. So I value sound, just as important as the animation, but when I start projects it’s always in visual terms first.
AS: So in the Psychotown pieces and some of your other work you’re not doing this a la anime – the audio track is recorded first, right?
DC: That’s correct.
AS: So, in the studio, what is your process like? Do you animate to a waveform?
DC: Well, what happens is, ultimately I know the script by heart and I wouldn’t be able to do it if I didn’t know the script verbatim, every line, how the lines are pronounced. What happens is I have the soundtrack as a waveform and I can see it in the timeline in my software, and what I do is I cut it up and then I put it into my frame grabber software so I can see all the wavelengths down the column. Basically I can’t, without – I need to have the script in front of me to actually know where I am at the script because I can’t actually hear the playback. I just know – I’m just judging by the rhythm of the wavelengths where we are at so I know where the pitches are, where the voices are accentuated. So basically I’m just sort of doing it blindly, but at the same time I’m just using the script as a guide and then following the wavelengths, but I can’t actually hear the playback, understand the playback.
AS: There’s wonderful subtle acting through all your work, but I especially love the
business that you have for your characters in the piece How and Why I Produced My
Submachine Gun. So it really comes at no surprise to me when you describe how
basically you’ve been acting from a very young age.
DC: Yeah. Well I think that has to do with the fact that I couldn’t understand people from a young age. It’s just that if I, I always demanded to be the center of attention because if I couldn’t follow what was being said, at least I could dictate conversation and dictate what was happening around me. But of course I couldn’t really talk until the age of three or five. So up to then I’d been fooling around physically so that way I could draw attention to myself. So ultimately I think there’s sort of that in me, where I just like to perform and to draw attention to myself. And I don’t think I’ve been able to shake that off.
AS: So obviously, you’ve always been really attentive to body language.
DC: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Again it’s been a good tool towards what I do right now. I think so much more can be conveyed through body language, and that interests me more than dialogue itself. It’s more, it gives you a more intelligent dimension to your work.
AS: In addition to directing our listeners to TheDaveCarterShow.com where you can
check out all things Dave Carter, I should also invite our listeners to Google “The Nice
Guys” at MySpace—The Nice Guys being a sketch comedy group from Sydney with
whom you collaborate a lot. One of the guys in the group is Nikos Andronicos, and he,
in addition to being a disgustingly talented musician and comic has also done music,
sound design, and voice work for a lot of your animations. How do you and Nikos know
each other?
DC: Well, actually Nikos and I have known each other for a long time. We grew up in the same neighborhood and went to the same primary school, went to the same high school, went to the same Uni. We lived together, so ultimately there’s that long line of connections. But Nikos, he’s very talented in a lot of other areas, like he’s a terrific writer, and he’s in a band. He can put together some really wonderful soundtracks for my work. It’s just been great to have someone who’s on the same wavelength with me, and I think it’s important to share your work with a colleague because doing it solo can be pretty lonesome.
AS: It really feels like a true collaboration. I mean you’re making their work stronger
and at the same time they’re making your work stronger.
DC: Yeah, well Nikos is part of this comedy team that’s been doing some virals and podcasts and so on. They started with a stage show, running for three years at university. Anyway, ultimately I just wanted to tap into their talents and collaborate on that. That’s why I’ve done a few projects with The Nice Guys because once again I think it’s really great to actually take up some of the baggage and share it with equal-minded people,
because up to then I think I was a bit tired of carrying the baby on my own. And so I thought, well, it’s actually a good experience to share around. You can get rid of your ego, for starters.
AS: When you first had a real body of work, you put it together in a screening for friends and the response was pretty good, you described. But the very first time that you played Daddy and James for Mom and Dad and the family, the response was kind of cool.
DC: Yeah, when I started my first stop-motion project which was Daddy and James, and I hadn’t animated for two years up to that point so I was so excited to actually show my mom and dad and my sister this sort of – coming out again, because I had gone into a kind of hiatus from, after this grueling honors project that I had done for an entire year, it sort of took the love of animation from me. Anyway, so I made Daddy and James and then got my mom and dad and sister around, and the response was not very flattering. Mom had said, you know, to never make a film like that ever again. So I tried to explain to her that when you project a film with the audience then the response will be entirely different. So basically the whole point of that screening was to prove to my mom and dad that ultimately I think Daddy and James would hold up if you had a collective response.
AS: I like the piece a lot but I’m always a fan of nightmare surrealist comedy, so there
you go. You’ve name-checked Terry Gilliam as a major influence. What were some of
your other big inspirations growing up?
DC: Well, I mean, no doubt, the Warner Brothers animations really inspired me completely growing up because it was just so incredibly visual over what was being screened in the 80s. So I would rather watch the coyote and roadrunner a thousand times over the Smurfs. So from that basis that’s what really attracted me to animation, but moreso, in the last few years I’ve been more drawn to live action filmmaking for influences because I think that animation is first and primarily filmmaking. It’s a filmmaking medium. So we shouldn’t look back to animation itself, otherwise we’ll be recycling ourselves, which I think is detrimental. Since so many animators continue to look to the Warner Brothers for inspiration, and try and replicate that, and I think that’s like eating your own tail. It’s just going around and around. So I think it’s important to look to other areas. And animation is inherently a postmodern medium, so I think that’s what we need to do, is to draw influences from many places beyond filmmaking.
AS: Are you as comfortable working with paper cut outs as you are in a digital medium
like Flash?
DC: Well, cutout is a much more preferred medium than working digitally even though I feel that I can handle digital-type animation proficiently. But what draws me to cutout is that it’s much more hands-on. It’s more tactile as a tangible approach to animation, and I was so sick and tired of having this sort of – it felt like a prosthetic device between myself and my work, working in Flash and I was so tired of that distance. So I decided to turn to cutout because I could actually hold my characters and creations and then animate. So I think it does have a great result when you watch it because in a way what you are seeing actually took place, but a frame at a time. And I think trying to foreground it in some kind of reality is so important – especially in comedy. So I think that you really need to emphasize some kind of weight. So I think when you’ve got shadows interplaying and you’ve got some textures, you’ve got depth. I think that can give it all that realism.
AS: I have not seen any of your new work for Animation Show 4. Can you give us a
little tease?
DC: Well what I’ve done is continued with some more Psychotowns. So I’ve created two more episodes for Animation Show 4, and Robert said that I’ve sort of stepped up a level with production design, and I think the script is even better and I think that it’s strong. So I feel that I’ve stepped up standards a bit. Ultimately because I think from what I’ve seen with the previous shows, they’ve been really, really polished, so I felt I had to get up to scratch. But normally I prefer to take the crude approach. I prefer to show that there wasn’t too much pre-planning and discipline with the production. But I think that still I didn’t compromise too much with the original rawness of Psychotown.
AS: Cool. Well listen, I want to thank you very much for talking with me. I know this
can’t have been the easiest thing. It’s a bit of a longer phone chat than you’re used
to. I really appreciate your talking to us.
DC: My pleasure. Thanks Taylor.
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