THE ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 3 DVD
Tony Comley
Animator, “Abigail” (2006)
Interviewer: Taylor Jessen
Date: 12/12/2007
Via e-mail from the UK
Animation Show: What was the story kernel for this short?
Tony Comley: In a way the idea happened backwards. I began with lots of detailed sequences, which then coalesced into themes and eventually found a home on board a burning airplane.
It was a conscious decision to write that way. At the time I was surrounded by lots of overwrought animation about war or moving to London from Bratislava, so I wanted to write something less self-conscious. For that reason the ‘meaning’ of the film fluctuates according to my mood, but really it’s just a collection of angry rants about evangelical Christians, art snobs and public transport.
AS: What were your duties – animation, sound design, voices, background design?
TC: Pretty much everything except the music and acting. It was made on a budget of £700 (about $1300), which went on a graphics tablet, a hard drive and lots of caffeine.
AS: Talk about the artists you admire that have made you who you are.
TC: Whoever wrote Danger Mouse is a god amongst men!
AS: “Penfold, shush!” Wow…for a long time I thought I was the only Danger Mouse fan in the U.S. We got to see all those episodes back in the mid-eighties thanks to Nickelodeon. I laughed like hell. I watched them all again recently and realized for the first time how much they were endlessly recycling the backgrounds and character poses. But the art is all strong, and of course David Jason and Terry Scott and company rock those voiceovers, so it all works. Maybe subconsciously the show was telling us “Hey, Cosgrove and Hall managed to produce huge numbers of these things despite vaporous resources, and they kept getting renewed, so there’s hope for us all”. Did Danger Mouse make you want to be part of the animation biz?
TC: It's hard to say how Danger Mouse influenced me. I remember wanting a flying car. I think you're right though; looking back you can see the rivets in it's construction but they did such a good job of knowing where to put the rivets. In fact as a child I remember noticing the repetition but reading it as intentional. I could draw all four of his poses; thinking, having an idea, about to dash, and high kick.
Also, regarding influences, I’ve just picked up a collection of Alan Moore short stories that he wrote for 2000 AD in the 1980s. They’re part of a series I used to read religiously when I was nine years old, and are very political in a way that would have traveled over my head at the time.
In fact reading them now puts a lot of modern satire to shame. These days it’s easy. You just have to poke fun at George Bush and everyone laughs, whereas eighties Britain was up against Margaret Thatcher! It’s the difference between fighting Donkey Kong and taking on Sauron.
AS: What art do you have hanging in your workspace or sitting on the shelf in books that you go to for inspiration?
TC: Since 2002 I’ve had a framed picture of Cerebus the Aardvark hanging on my wall. He’s walking toward a large foreboding mansion holding a sack of all his possessions and looking thoroughly pissed off.
Otherwise I have a picture looming over me by a friend called Eleanor Meredith. She took her first leap into animation recently and the result [Lemon Tits, viewable online at www.eleanormeredith.co.uk] gave me a kick up the bum and reminded me how to make a brilliant, quick animation.
AS: How long did the project take from start to finish?
TC: About three months of 14-hour days, during which I aged visibly and my eyebrows went white.
AS: Were you test-driving any new skills or technology here? Or working with anyone for the first time?
TC: Well I’d never written or animated a short film before, so there was a steep learning curve with pretty much every aspect. I also worked with a composer, which was very satisfying. The moment the film gained a heartbeat for me was when I heard the score being recorded. We had a string quartet, a guitarist, a flautist and a gospel choir, which made for a really fun couple of days.
AS: Talk about your scholastic background and your professional background. What led you to animation?
TC: Growing up I’d always been artistic. I used to draw on any surface available including people until I worked out what paper was for. I then drew obsessively for about twenty years with a particular fascination for skulls until I worked out what Graphics Tablets were for. You can see some of my childhood drawings (if you’re into that kinda thing) on my website: www.tonycomley.co.uk
All this time I was throwing glances at animation but thinking I’d never make one without a huge camera and about three years’ wages. I used to use an Amiga 500 running Deluxe Paint when I was about twelve years old, but by the time I was at university everyone had pirate copies of Flash and After Effects, while computers capable of running them were dipping below £1000.
Meanwhile I was in Belgium making a children’s book called The King Who Loved Apple Pies. It was basically Nietzsche for kids and was completely rubbish, but it looked very much like a storyboard, so lots of people suggested I start animating. It was all the encouragement I needed to begin a life of drawing thousands of near identical pictures while pumping in just enough sugar and caffeine to keep me alive.
So in 2001 I applied to the Royal College of Art with an animation of a Spike Milligan poem [Ning Nang Nong, viewable at www.tonycomley.co.uk] and an interactive abstract work that makes sex noises when you roll over it . They really liked the sex noises, so in 2002 I moved to London to learn about animation and make Abigail.
AS: Where are you now and what are you working on?
TC: I’ve got a couple of projects on the go. At the moment I’m making a music video for a group called Alexander’s Annexe. They’re outwardly quite dark and intense, but I know that inside they’re all about glitter and fairy lights, so I’m making the video out of Christmas decorations.
I’m also doing pitch consultancy for a company that have written a TV series and need a package to take to commissioners. It’s set in the fictional London borough of Bedlam and is populated by dysfunctional anthropomorphised cats. I like it for what it can get away with. You can say some pretty confrontational things through an anthropomorphised cat.
Otherwise I’m following up on my Alan Moore fixation by writing a comic book, but if I told you what it was about I’d have to kill you…and everyone who reads this interview.
AS: What percentage of your day job is animation? What percentage of your artistic footprint is animation? Are they the same thing?
TC: I’ve just finished nine months directing and doing character design for a BBC project teaching French through the antics of a Gallic Rock band. Before and since then I’ve managed to keep my balance on the huge wave of freelance animation that London chucks out. So I’d say about 80% of my work life is spent animating, the rest is spent trying to understand self-employment tax forms.
When I’m not getting paid to animate I’m usually writing/pitching, or doing performances, where I’ll either make an animation beforehand, or produce live visuals on the night.
It’s hard keeping balance between freelancing and personal work, especially in London where it’s relatively easy to fall back on endless compositing jobs. I find the best motivation is a liberal dose of guilt and a partner who’s more successful than you.
AS: I can see some live action reference in Abigail, but you’ve fucked with it in interesting ways. What’s your biggest stylistic touchstone for this short?
TC: It was a tricky one to stylize. I filmed the live action as purely a reference at first. I knew I needed the performance of the main character to be subtle and credible, and although I am, like most animators, a frustrated actor, I’m also not a very good one (I once played Romeo in front of 200 appalled amateur theatre enthusiasts).
So I had professional actors lay down a performance and after lots of hair pulling I found the best way to express those performances is to loosely rotoscope them. The idea was to pick the key eye movements and facial twitches and be very tight and detailed with them, then contrast it all by getting loose and expressive at moments of intensity (like the depressurized cabin scene).
I didn’t really have an outside stylistic reference, although some parts look worryingly like the iTunes ads.
AS: Everyone on board the plane has a really singular face. Are these people you know? Faces from your sketchbook?
TC: They’re mostly friends with interesting faces. There are three animators in there; Ian Gouldstone who made Guy101, Max Hattler who made Collision and Luis Zamora Pueyo who made My Grandmother and About Sophia.
AS: Those three artists are indeed going places. Our readers now need to Google Ian’s guy 101 and Luis’ My Grandmother, and check out Max’s Collision elsewhere on this disc. Were they all classmates of yours? And since you got your degree have you found yourself working with them, or working for them, or conspiring against them, or living in the same flats with them? Just how small a town is London?
TC: Well I was in the same class at the Royal College of Art with all of them, and I lived with Ian and Luis for two years. I've done some work with Max recently through a composers’ collective called C3, and Luis is back in Spain working on Pocoyo. We're all pretty competitive with each other which is why, when Ian won the BAFTA, I had to contain the urge to bury him in a ditch and steal his award.
I think the animation scene over here is quite compartmentalized. To generalize for a second: There's a definite trail of footprints between the RCA and a small number of studios like Sherbet and Passion Pictures. When you visit these places it can sometimes feel like an RCA reunion. You see a lot of the same people...which makes me wonder if it's all a big Truman Show hoax.
AS: Ruth Lingford rocks. Talk about her and the other parties on your thank-you list.
TC: Ruth was my personal tutor at RCA and she’s in the gospel choir singing at the end of the film. She’s now teaching at Harvard and as far as I know is making a film about a very famous penis. (No, not George Bush… See, it’s easy!)
Among the others on the list you have ‘Butch Truxton’, who’s actually Ian Gouldstone going by a name that he uses to make himself sound masculine, and Abigail Rice, whose name and acting skills I borrowed for the film.
AS: Now that you’ve made the short, what do you think – should we poor sods living in Wal-Mart Nation storm the cockpit?
TC: Ha ha, well I wouldn’t want to be seen condoning Wal-Mart-prompted terrorism. But as an ex-employee of ASDA (who are run by Wal-Mart) I’d be honoured to lead the charge!
AS: Sorry, I didn’t mean to go all People’s Front of Judea there…I suppose what I’m saying is that I prefer to see Abigail as a film about how our big safe Western comfort zone is a plane that’s about to crash, and we know we should grab the controls, but there’s always something in the way, something important or something prosaic or something that isn’t even really there. Like the dream where you’re trying to find the bathroom – you can never quite manage it, or if you can the door won’t shut, and so on. We put things in our own way to avoid change. Sort of the Bathroom Dream plus An Inconvenient Truth plus the Pacific-gyre-is-full-of-floating-plastic meme, all smashed together in one nightmare meditation. Was any of that going through your head when you made it? Or is Abigail an all-purpose neurosis Rorschach test?
TC: Ha ha. I like that description! Actually Abigail is a good film to project your own themes onto because it's not too precious about its own. From that list, though, I'd pick the idea of putting things in our way to avoid change as the one I most relate to.
The film sometimes seems like a big attack on religion and class, but if you distill it down it's really an expression of the very general feeling of being trapped in an environment whose values you don't share. However the protagonist in this case is unaware that he's just as bad as the rest of the passengers.
It starts with him fixating on something he thinks has subtlety and meaning so he can block out the noise around him. But when he flees economy class he finds that first class is just as bad and goes back to fixating on the photo. He repeats this pattern with the stewardesses until he reaches the cockpit and finds that his fixation is the cause of all his grief. He then tries desperately to save the plane but realizes if he doesn't let it crash it'll be falling forever. When the plane finally explodes the structure keeping him apart from his fixation is dissolved, making him whole again and leaving us with a sequence that exists to remind everyone that this is all a lot of existential bollocks so it's time we had a sing-along!
So to take the Rorschach analogy; it's an ink-blot certainly, but it's meant to look like a severed head, you just project your own face onto it.
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