THE ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 4 Theatrical
Grant Orchard
Animator, “Love Sport - Paintballing” (2007)
Interviewer: Taylor Jessen
Date: 6/11/2008
Via e-mail from London
Animation Show: Did your first big design epiphany come while you were playing Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II+? Or were you inspired growing up by videogame graphics in general?
Grant Orchard: No, not really. I did love Daley Thompson’s Decathlon on the Commodore64 when I was younger though.
You had to hit the keys alternately to run, and if you wanted to throw or jump you pressed spacebar. The last event was the 1500 meters and you had to keep pumping those keys for what seemed like hours. It was business class.
As for design epiphany I’d like to say it was seeing a Hockney painting for the first time or being truly moved by the typography on a New Order album cover, but I think it was probably seeing Dogmatix in the Asterix books.
AS: Precocious youth frittered away doodling? Public school? Art school? First paying job as designer?
GO: Not in any way precocious, I use to draw a lot of Muppets. Usually the big hairy one called Sweetums. Mostly I was down the park doing jumps on my Dawes Disco racer. My parents refused me a BMX because they weren’t practical enough. I ruined that racer.
My Art school was Farnham College of Art and Design. It’s a small art college about 20 miles outside London. It’s produced animators like Michael Dudok De Wit, Smith from Smith & Foulkes, Darren Walsh. Up to about ten years ago it was still the only dedicated animation course in Britain, so if you were interested in animation you tended to end up there.
AS: Talk a little about hooking up with Studio AKA and your first work as a commercial director.
GO: Just about my first job out of Art college was working at StudioAKA. I started there as a runner and then animator. I pitched on a job a couple of years into my time there that got chosen by the creative who was looking for a badly drawn sketchy style. Bingo! I ended up co-directing it and it turned out pretty well. It’s got a cracking track by the Aphex Twin on it. You can still see it on the StudioAKA website under Compaq ‘Bird’
AS: How did you get the opportunity to make your first animated short Welcome to Glaringly? Did production go smoothly? What were the big lessons learned from the experience?
GO: I was commissioned by Channel 4 to make a three-minute film that would slot between the end of the seven o’clock news and the beginning of their more mainstream programs. It’s a slot they’ve kept and they now call it the “3 Minute Wonder”. It’s for new or experimental filmmakers and covers documentary, dance, animation, etc. It’s a good thing.
I got the commission at about the same time I was thinking about taking a break from studio/commercial work. So the money from that kept me in egg and beans for a while.
On the surface it seemed a pretty unruffled, smooth production. Everything was done in time but I wasn’t a pretty sight by the end of it. I’m no producer. That’s the lesson I learnt from that experience.
AS: What was the seed for ParkFootBall and how did it lead to ten follow-up Love Sport shorts with Qoob? And what is Qoob’s bailiwick exactly?
GO: ParkFootBall came out of trying to learn AfterEffects. I thought I’d try and animate something and picked the easiest thing I could create, which was a rectangle. I did a little run cycle, and then I added a ball and then I kept on going. Eventually I had two minutes of animation. Onedotzero encouraged me to finish it off and then took it on tour with them. Which was good of them.
Qoob saw it on the Italian leg and came up with the idea of doing a series of ten. They’re perfect commissioners/patrons. They gave us some money and said they weren’t worried about seeing anything until we’d finished it. I was gobsmacked.
Being a bit thick I’ve just had to look up what ‘bailiwick’ means on Wikipidia. You mean what’s Qoob’s bag?
They’re Italian MTV and they’ve decided to put all their content online, but a bit like Youtube where you can submit stuff to the channel yourself and watch it all when and where you want…I think.
What I do know is that they’re one of the few people who are funding short film at the moment in Europe. They’re currently funding a film by Tokyo Plastic which should be interesting. They’re a good bunch.
AS: Was the objective on the “Love Sport” series to go as stripped-down as possible in both audio and video terms?
GO: I’m really into minimal graphic design and since Welcome to Glaringly I’ve been trying to communicate as much as I can with as little as possible. It was kind of an experiment, especially on ParkFootBall, and I would have ended it there but Qoob’s offer of doing a series of ten just seemed like too much fun.
I’m kind of going the other way now, detail detail detail.
AS: Do you paintball? Or participate in any of othe other sports in the series? Any of the gags based on personal experience? (Besides the monster rabbit obviously.)
GO: Football is about the only game I play regularly these days. Not that I was any sort of action man before that. I went paintballing on my stag do. Got shot to bits within the first minute and then nursed some horrible bruises for the next few months. My friend, who’s from Portugal , got shot on her leg and had a massive bruise there that was the exact same shape as the map of Portugal. Weird eh.
AS: What software platforms have you used the most in recent years? Any impetus to venture into traditional animation? (Or did you already do that on the Compaq spots? Those had multiple directors so I wasn’t sure.)
GO: I’ve always been a traditional animator. It’s only been the last five to six years that I’ve learned about computers. It’s taken over though. My lightbox is gone from my desk now and I’m barely hanging on to my electric pencil sharpner. Shame really. It’s all in the basement just in case we need it, but mostly these days I’m using Photoshop, Flash and XSI.
AS: Have any of your shorts done the festival circuit, and if so have you had the opportunity to tag along? Seen any interesting sights? Sat with any interesting audiences?
GO: Yeah most of them have done the festival circuit. In Annecy they were mad and brilliant. I was told that if they don’t like your film they’ll let you know. I walked into the start of the screening and things were being thrown everywhere, it was so noisy. When it actually started they were the best audience, really responsive and sweet. The film after mine got a terrible time, I thought it was brilliant but they gave it some right stick. The director refused to get out of his seat after the screening.
Clermont-Ferrand was cool too. ParkFootBall was put into this really hardcore experimental section and stuck out like an idiot cousin making a scene. There was a massive snowfall during the festival, where cars couldn’t drive anywhere, but there were still queues round the block for the screenings. The French love their film. Brilliant.
AS: What’s the most bitchen thing your coworkers at Studio AKA are working on now? And what’s your latest project?
GO: There are two big half-hour projects in production at the moment. One is just being finished, that’s the new film by Marc Craste, and the other is a film from Philip Hunt which will be ready for Christmas. Both are looking great.
I’m working on a couple of commercials at the moment and scratching myself.
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