THE ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 3 DVD
Guilherme Marcondes
Animator, “Tyger” (2006)
Interviewer: Taylor Jessen
Date: 12/23/2007
Via e-mail from Los Angeles
Animation Show: Talk about Cultura Inglesa, and talk about how you picked the subject for the short.
Guilherme Marcondes: Cultura Inglesa is an English school in Brazil. Every year they sponsor a festival of Brazilian art related to British culture. There are music shows, theater performances, fine arts exhibitions and a “digital cinema” scheme that gives a grant to help produce three chosen scripts based on a British literary text. Tyger was one of the films sponsored in 2006. I always wanted to do something related to that poem by William Blake so it made sense to me to apply a script for the competition.
AS: Were you in charge of all the visual aspects, or was it an across-the-board collaboration among the whole team?
GM: Although I guided the production of all elements I gave the collaborators a definite but open brief, more like “go that direction” than “do exactly this”. I let each person interpret the script and do their own thing based on the mood I was after.
AS: Talk about the artists you admire that have made you who you are.
GM: That’s always hard to answer, there’s too many. One current director that’s a cliché to mention these days is Michel Gondry. I’ve been following his work for a while and the fact that he uses many techniques to achieve his vision, from live action to stop motion animation, is definitely an inspiration to me as you can see clearly on Tyger. Anyway, there’s hundreds of other people.
AS: What art do you have hanging in your workspace or sitting on the shelf in books that you go to for inspiration?
GM: I recently moved so my walls are almost bare. I used to be an illustrator for a while. I used to draw compulsively since I was a little child and not as much these days but I still have lots of illustration books and comics. Second thing are art books, especially painting and photography. I used to work at a motion-design studio for years and they had such a big library I never had to buy my own design books. I can say that’s the weakest part of my bookshelf.
AS: How long did the project take from start to finish?
GM: Production took three months. The tiger puppet took itself another month at the beginning.
AS: Were you test-driving any new skills or technology here? Or stylistic techniques you’d not yet attempted?
GM: I wouldn’t say any element there is new but the mix is unusual. I think the aesthetic approach to the different techniques was very personal.
AS: Talk about your scholastic background and your professional background. What led you to animation?
GM: I have a bachelor’s degree in Architecture. I started working in animation while I still was in college. I was invited to do some character design and other things in a studio owned by a friend of mine. I ended up working there for five years and learned everything I know in there. It was a small studio and I know it’s one of the best know Brazilian studios abroad, called Lobo.
AS: Where are you now and what are you working on?
GM: I’m living in LA. I was working at a company called Motion Theory. Now I’m directing through Hornet Inc. I’m doing mostly commercials and planning a new short film and other projects in different formats.
AS: What percentage of your day job is animation? What percentage of your artistic footprint is animation? Are they the same thing?
GM: My day job is animation for commercials. Most of the time but not always it’s what you can call motion-design. There’s been less and less of it since I’ve been more interest in story-telling than design.
AS: This is a really cool mash-up of very old and very new animation techniques. Was that contrast intentional?
GM: Yes. It was also interesting to create a noise in the CG by deliberately choosing a (literally) hands-on technique. So often CG draws you to achieve technical perfection because you can change everything all the time. We got used to seeing perfection in something that looks untouched by human hands and I find it boring. A few people got a little confused and thought I was lazy or under a tight budget that didn’t allow me to roto the puppet manipulators out. I find it funny that only animation people thought that. The general public got it straight away.
AS: Is the film set anywhere in particular? I don’t recognize any of the landmarks, but I think any big-city resident can relate to the orange haze of light pollution and the urban hillside with the transmission tower overlooking us all.
GM: It’s São Paulo, my hometown. The city is the biggest inspiration for the film. I think it’s more about the place than Blake’s poem in the end. Obviously I took care in choosing places that are recognizable to Brazilians that would also work for everyone else as generic urban images.
AS: This reminds me of Tom Gibbons’ animated short "The Hunger Artist", which is another short based on a literary work. You both decided to go completely dialogue-free, and you both nailed the mood of the original text without having to include a single word of that text. Gibbons was working from a short story by Kafka, and he has said that he felt like he was struggling to keep the story intact. Did freeing yourself of the text make the process easier or harder?
GM: Unfortunately I haven’t seen the short you mention but I never worried about staying true to the poem because I think there’s no such thing. Poems are as interesting as they are an inexhaustible source of inspiration. For centuries people will be inspired by it in different ways. I really tried to stay true to the impression I had when reading it and I’m glad many people felt the same as me, but I couldn’t compare it to one of the greatest English poems of all time. Another thing is Blake’s poem is very simple in structure (of course it takes a genius to make simplicity so powerful) and it relies on strong visual symbols. I guess adapting Kafka to the world of sound and vision is a much harder task.
|