I would like to write my essay on the work of Adam Elliot, a personal favourite animator of mine. As a starting point I have compiled some point from various interviews to hear what Elliot says about his own films. This could give me a good starting point for my essay. I have highlighted areas that I could quote in my essay.
Elliot talking about animation in Australia (2009)
2:33 ‘When I was starting out the equipment we needed cost hundreds of thousands of dollars so it was really quite limiting to who could be an animator but now all you needs a digital camera a couple hundred dollars download some software and the computer’
3:05 ‘I think the most rewarding part of being an animator is of course when the films finished and supplement the big screen and the audience is laughing or being moved or being affected in some way, but it’s also the process when I was making my last film (Mary and Max) I was almost disappointed when it got to the end of the making process’
3:53 ‘There’s something about especially 3d animation that I find really magical and enticing‘
Adam Elliot discussing Mary and Max (2015)
1:18 ‘When they (the audience) see an Adam Elliott film what they’re seeing is 100% made in camera in a traditional manner and at every prop set and character that they see has been handcrafted well there’s a few reasons I choose stop-motion animation over CGI and the main reason is because I like using my hands’
2:33′ At the end of the day it’s the story that’s the most important thing with all my films. I’ve always said that I’ve never been obsessed by their length because my films are biographies, I always let the characters tell me how long their stories should be. My first four films were all shorts the first was uncle then cousin then brother and they are all roughly about five minutes in length. They each took about a year to make and after I’d made those three I thought well I feel like I want to explore a biography that’s a bit longer, a bit more challenging. So that’s when we decided to pursue Harvey crumpet and Harvey ended up telling us that his story should be about 23 minutes which was a perfect commercial half hour for SBS television. You know it always focused on one character and I thought well it’s time we decided to make Mary and Max. It is still a biographical but it’s really about two lead characters’
4:02 ‘Animation for some reason that’s over 100 minutes becomes a bit becomes a bit intolerable I think you once you’ve suspended your disbelief for that amount of time in animation it doesn’t work so most animated features are generally under a hundred minutes’
4:36 ‘Once the storyboard and the script are what we call locked off we then move into a very intense pre-production stage that took about six to eight months and that’s where we really planned the aesthetic to the film how detailed we could go with the sets and props and really worked out all the logistics’
Elliot discussing his first film Uncle (2016)
0:00 ‘I knew from from day one that I wanted uncle to really the full of poignancy and that’s very hard to do with little clay characters not only did the audience have to suspend their disbelief but they have to believe these little blobs of clay are real people so that when they die the audience empathizes’
0:30 ‘I’m glad that uncle was a film that I had the courage to make in a different manner to the way animated shorts were being made at the time so I certainly think your first film should also be your bravest film and the one in which you take a lot of risks because often down the track you don’t get the chances to take those risks’
Maddy Caulfield Animation 