TERRAFARMER
Directed by Will Adams
Produced by Once Were Farmers
Terrafarmer is a sc-fi comedy about a lone astronaut trapped on a desert planet with only a malfunctioning robot for company. It’s about our love-hate relationship with technology – there is so much we couldn’t do with out machines and yet they always seem to break down at the most crucial moments.
Will Adams, director of Terrafarmer described the circumstances that resulted in the creation of his film;
Frustrated by the chicken and egg scenario of not being eligible for certain funding until we’d had a successful short, and having tastes that didn’t necessarily coincide with the short film schemes, we decided that rather than spending our time trying to convince funders otherwise, we should put our spare-time into making out own short. In order to do this it had to be very short and, out of a raft of ideas, Terrafarmer was collectively chosen as one of the simplest to make (only two characters and no dialogue) and one with the most potential to turn into a series.
The first draft, which we took to market in Annecy in 2007, was completed in about 3 months between other jobs but it wasn’t until a year later that it had reached a standard we were happy with and we started putting it into festivals. This is reflected in the fact that it’s the time spent tweaking and refining the work that is almost always the longest part of the process and the hardest to estimate. Particularly with computer animation, it’s very quick to block out the work and give yourself the illusion of being nearly done. I guess it depends how fussy you are, but it means, no matter how long you have to do something, you always end up working right to deadline and have to call it a day before you’re totally satisfied with the result. Then again you have to remember that the audience isn’t going to be watching the film on a loop for months on end.
Other awards that Terrafarmer has been nominated for are the Scottish New Talent Bafta, “Best Animated Comedy” at Dragon Con in Atlanta, and the Children’s Jury Award at Encounters in Bristol
OWF are just finishing off motion graphics for BBC 2s “Funny Side of…” series and filming backdrops for an animated promo for Baxterbear, who will be appearing in the Edinburgh Festival. They are about half-way through, Jana Prchlova’s short “Mondo’s Search for the Sun” and their next short “The Midge” (a horror film) has just been commissioned and is in pre-production. It’s a busy year for OWF…
ASTRONAUT
EIFF Premiere
Directed by Jamie Stone and Anders Jedenfors, winners of last years McLaren Award for their short animation ‘The World According To….’, which went on to win the Scottish Bafta for Animation.
Astronaut was made as a music video for the Swedish singer Salem Al Fakir. As the track’s title was Astronaut, Jamie and Anders seceded to make the video about a lone astronaut making his way back to earth after a long voyage and seeing fantastic nebulae, wormholes and hallucinations out of his window as he flies through space. The directors play a lot with quite abstract images that were hung around the thread of the astronaut’s journey.
The film came about through Anders Jedenfors, the co-director on the film. Anders had been working on a few music videos in Sweden and was offered the opportunity to make a video based on the same animation style of Jamie and Anders Scottish Bafta winning ‘World According To…” series that they did for Channel 4 last year. There was an extremely tight deadline to make it and ended up producing the video very quickly. Within a week of finishing the animation, it had been released on Swedish TV and reached number 1 in the videos chart.
Astronaut was made using stop-motion sand drawings. As with ‘The World According To…” Jamie and Anders didn’t storyboard. Each morning Anders and Jamie would wake up and say “well what are we going to draw today then?” which made each working day far more invigorating as the creative process is taking place as you work rather than before. To save time during production, they often both drew on the same frame at the same time, which was a lot of fun. They also tried moving the light sources under the lightbox frame by frame to get lens flare at the right points which resulted in a lot of burnt fingers and some pretty images.
Jamie Stone recently finished an animated video game advert and he is going into postproduction on a BBC Scotland documentary he has been making about the Grameen bank.
THE FINGER TRAP
Directed by Julia L McLean
Produced by Ko Lik Films
‘The Finger Trap’ features the elderly but young at heart Wilson Brown who becomes stuck in his Chinese finger trap toy whilst preparing an anniversary surprise for his wife. The idea behind the film is that you’re never too old to get into mischief!
Julia was fascinated by Chinese finger traps as a child and she had the initial idea of an old man finding his grandson’s finger trap toy and getting into trouble with it. The idea and script was developed through the Writers Factory: Introduction to Screen Writing course at the Screen Academy in Edinburgh in 2007, and tightened further once the film was commissioned.
‘The Finger Trap’ is stop frame animation with a few digital effects. A small crew worked on model making – the models and puppets for ‘The Finger Trap’ are based on a ratio of 1:7 life-size – and post production of the film. One of the main issues with Stopframe is the maintenance of the puppets – we had two Wilson puppets and a lot of replacement hair!
The animation was shot using a Nikon D80 Digital Camera and the images were digitally composited for rig removal and FX using Adobe AfterEffects.
In October 2008 ‘The Finger Trap’ was nominated for a Jim Poole Award. It has recently been nominated for best animation at the A Corto di Donne – Women’s short film festival in Naples – Italy, and in March this year won the BAFTA New Talent Award for Best Animation.
Julia L McLean is currently animating for BBC Scotland on a CBBC Stopframe series called ‘OOglies’, which is due to be broadcast in August this year. She is also developing ideas for future films.
SCREENING DETAILS
McLaren 1 at the Filmhouse. 20th June 18.20