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Hackett Films, Sydney Opera House and Screen NSW launch competition to find graphic storytellers

Hackett Films, along with Australia’s most iconic artistic hub, the Sydney Opera House and Screen NSW are today launching an international search for the best graphic storytellers, as part of the Sydney Opera House’s inaugural GRAPHIC festival.

A weekend festival from 7 – 8 August 2010, GRAPHIC will celebrate the imagination and ideas of visionary creators in the fields of comix, anime, manga, 2D and 3D animation and illustration.

Over three rounds, competition entrants will vie for $20,000 in cash, by creating a 60 second story that weaves in compulsory narrative elements, such as an archetypal theme: ‘recovery’, a character: ‘a 7 year old’, and a sound fx; ‘a yawn’.  As each round progress, one more element will be added to give the competition an extra twist.

Entrants can be an individual or a creative team, and the story can be captured in any form, from a storyboard comic to stop-motion or 3D animation.

At the end of each round, the public will vote for their favourite stories. A judging panel including award-winning director James Hackett from Sydney-based production house Hackett Films, will then shortlist a handful of the best entries to continue to each subsequent round.

“Graphic novels are all about the story so entries should really focus this narrative process – we want people to be sucked into the characters and emotion of the story and left desperate to watch the next episode”, says Hackett Films founder and director, and GRAPHIC Competition Judge,  James Hackett.“We’re looking for entries that don’t just tick the box when it comes to incorporating the narrative elements, but approach these requirements in a considered, intelligent way to create a really rich storyline”.

In addition to the $20,000 cash prize, which can be used for professional development, post production or to invest in taking the animation to local or international market, the winner will receive an Adobe CS5 Master Collection (valued at $4,333) and have their film screened at GRAPHIC.

GRAPHIC’s keynote event will feature celebrated graphic novelist Neil Gaiman reading his new as-yet unpublished story The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains in the Concert Hall. The festival will also include an evening with independent filmmaker and comic writer Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma), the legendary Japanese anime epic Akira rescored live by Regurgitator, and Ben Walsh and the Orkestra of the Underground creating a live score to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.

For more information about the GRAPHIC festival and online animation competition please visit the following website: www.sydneyoperahouse.com/graphic

Sorry. It’s just funny, that’s all.

Just showing a bit of love to Shane Acker’s film before it goes live in the UK… For a refresher on my interview with Shane, see HERE.

Oh my. For years I’ve been saying that Hollywood is bankrupt of ideas. When they began making old TV shows into movies, that was a sign (The Flintstones… what!?). When they began making amusement park rides into films, I thought the writing was on the wall (The Haunted Mansion… what!?). And of course, they’ve been making games into movies for a bit now, with such instant classics as Max Payne. WHAT!?

Enter the latest desperate grab for audience cash – films from games. No, board games. Yep, that’s right. Reportedly, directors as notable as Ridley Scott and Peter Berg have respectively signed on to big-budget versions of Monopoly and Battleship, and there’s even a version of Candy Land in the works. More from this report from Morning Edition. Wow. If the Hollywood decision makers continue the trend of never having to learn to read or think, maybe one day they’ll make a movie out of card games like Hearts or Bridge. Yay Culture!

What a great idea! 1884: Yesterday’s Future is a whacked-out Terry Gilliam-looking mishmash of techniques including puppets, 2D and 3D elements, all cobbled together to tell a tongue-in-cheek steampunk past-future comedic adventure story. Little surprise that the Tim Ollive and Dennis De Groot test footage spawned a Real Film Deal, and that the production has landed at Peculiar Pictures where none other than Terry Gilliam himself is Executive Producer.

Thanks to friend of the blog Michael Dowswell for the tip!

Man, I hope Hollywood takes note. Check out the latest Box Office News. While we’ve been playing with our Transformers and our G.I. Joe* and our remakes of 70s TV shows, the rest of the world has been trying to figure out how to make a better breed of film. Yeah, we’ve heard it all before, but this time, it’s not just the intellectual snobs like me, or just the critics. Actual Real Audiences have been going to see District 9 and Ponyo. These are weird films, strange entertainment to be sure. Not Hollywood fluff, and not at all predictable.

I’m so glad to see a better grade of film available to audiences, which demand a bit more of the audience. They demand you pay attention to the plot. They demand you are patient while strange ideas morph and evolve and become the theme of the film. They are different, and that is demanding to an audience that has become complacent and rather infantile. And I’m glad that, judging from the box office numbers, the mature, patient, attentive audience I always suspected was out there waiting for a better breed of film is out there. Thank God, intelligent film seekers – you are not alone.

Now if only Hollywood can get a clue and begin making actual chance-taking films again, we might have that long-promised Film Rennaissance. How bout it? It’d be a shame if the rest of the world passes us by on this one.

*OK. G.I.Joe is still bringing in the cash, but I don’t think anyone involved is going to put that film on the top of their resume. I mean, come on… really?

Gareth Jones has been developing “Of Giants and Windmills“, a 40-minute animated film for about 3 years now. This Don Quixote adaptation has a lush, illustrative look – just the kind of film that appeals to me – and the director’s story-first approach is quite promising. As he prepares a trailer of the film for a June release, he took a few minutes out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about the film and his approach to making it.

OGDEN: Is your trailer on track for JUN 2009? Beginning of the month? Or end?

JONES: The trailer is going better than expected – it’s already cut together. I just have some backgrounds to finish off – they’re the time-consuming bit – and final bits of music to record. I’m expecting it to be second or third week of June.

OGDEN: What inspired the look of the film?

JONES: Two very clear inspirations; Sylvain Chomet’s ‘Belleville Rendezvous’ and early 20th Century English illustrator, Arthur Rackham. ‘Belleville’ was the film that connected all the dots, inspiring me to make a film. Arthur Rackham’s work is just astonishingly beautiful. With a firm idea on look, it became much easier to visualise scenes – even to run them in my head before setting anything down.

OGDEN: Have you seen Lost in La Mancha? What do you think of the Quixote curse?

JONES: I love that film – Lost in La Mancha is like Fawlty Towers and Spinal Tap rolled into one. I defy anyone to watch that it without a dropped jaw – it is quite astonishing. Jean Rochefort would have been an amazing Quixote.

Of the Quixote curse – it’s well documented that Orson Welles spent more than ten years trying to bring Quixote to the screen. Disney explored the idea in 1940, 1946, 1951 and sometime around 2000. Quixote is to filmmakers what Macbeth is to theatre.

I’ve read recently that Gilliam is resurrecting ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’ – and looking to start shooting next spring. I hope he gets it done. But, how on earth do you follow ‘Lost in La Mancha’? As for me – well, there’s still plenty of time for it all to go disastrously wrong.

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OGDEN: Did you work on the film alone? Full time or part time?

JONES: For the first 18 months or so it was all on my own, part time. Being so close to a piece of work makes it extremely difficult to be objective. I wanted some honest feedback on what I was doing and was starting to think about voice artists, so I got back in touch with an old friend, Ade.

Ade knew nothing about the book, but was intrigued by the script and pestered me into letting him out some ideas for the characters. A week or so later he started leaving me these crazy voicemails at work from Quixote, Carrasco and assorted pseudo-Spanish narrators. I knew then I wouldn’t need to look any further.  Ade had never done voiceover work, but what he came up with was inspired – and, he was so completely into it. That kind of enthusiasm only serves to make you more determined. From then on, he’s critiqued, helped record foley and pulled together the website. I’m not precious – if he makes a suggestion that I think will benefit the film, I’d be stupid to ignore it.

But all the visuals, music and screenplay – that’s just me.

OGDEN: Were you ever tempted to stop working on the project, or jump to another? How did you stay focused?

JONES: That’s a damn good question. I didn’t start the project immediately – not until I was firm on what I wanted the story to be and clear on how it would look. At the time I was also mad keen on running and doing 70-80km a week in preparation for the Edinburgh Marathon. I had a couple of months before I knew I would be able to commit fully to the film – so by then I was chomping at the bit to be getting started.

No, I never thought of shifting projects. I was a fan of the novel for many years before considering making a film, so the choice of subject was quite natural. If I were going to run into difficulties, then they would be there regardless of what the project was. Quixote has a particularly tricky structure, but once I’d figured out how to make it accessible, then it was relatively straightforward.

Looking back, a healthy blend of ignorance and enthusiasm probably helped. Next time around, knowing what to expect, I’ll probably harbour more doubts.

OGDEN: Did you run into any obstacles along the way? Pick one, and tell me how you overcame it.

JONES: Well, it must be that age-old problem of finding the time. I have a wife and two girls. To be fair to them, I never work on the film before the kids go to bed. Of course, my eldest was five when I started the project, now she’s eight and likes to stay up a lot later… I also work pretty long hours running a graphics department for a property consultancy in London.

I don’t recall where the figure came from, but quite early on I set in mind that I’d try to work five hours a day on the film, with the odd evening off to re-charge my batteries. So, my evenings tend to be 8pm-1am, rise again about 5.30am for work and catnap on the train into London. It’s a fairly brutal regime, but once you’re into a routine, it’s not so bad.

Yes, I could do fewer hours each day, but that quickly adds months onto production time. And I’m doing this because I want to, not because it’s a chore. Everything else is about trying to streamline the process.

I have a maxim I try to stick to of “Do the jobs you don’t like doing first, because you’ll always find time to do the things you love”. More practically, I batch render scenes at night rather than waste time watching them; Break everything down into manageable chunks; and Always try to have a clear idea of what I’m going to be working on each day before I sit down.

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OGDEN: What did you learn from making the film?

JONES: There’s a big difference between thinking you can do something and actually doing it.

By the time I’ve finished I’ll have gone through the whole process. Next time it can be bigger, better, longer. I’m only just starting out, it’s extremely exciting, but there’s really no reason why I can’t make whatever film I want in the future.

Animwatch was a huge inspiration for me. No-one had to make any of those films – and yet, they did (and hopefully still do). And it helped underline that what I was setting out to do was possible.

OGDEN: What do you hope people take away from the film?

JONES: I’d hope people feel empathy for Quixote. He has an enthusiasm for life. He’s at his happiest doing his own thing, regardless of others’ opinion of him.

Yet, when it’s beaten out of him, there’s a realisation that the world had been a better place all along. It’s okay to be a dreamer. Of course, if the film encourages anyone to pick up the book, or make a film, then so much the better.

OGDEN: When will the film be released?

JONES: It’s looking like an August/September completion. Life sometimes gets in the way, but there’s clear light at the end of the tunnel.

Festivals are the priority, but there’ll be private cinema screenings as well. How quickly it becomes publicly available will depend on how well it’s received.

OGDEN: What are you working on next?

JONES: Well, I’m tentatively toying with four different stories for feature-length productions. Ade and I are really keen to work on another project together, so we’ll develop a few ideas and see which one runs. I expect he’ll throw a few things into the bag as well. It might be CG animated, it could be stop-motion, or it could be a hybrid of physical models with animation. It’ll be whatever the story requires. But, absolutely no development before this film finishes.

Whilst we’re exploring ideas, we’ll be recording some Quixote radio plays to podcast and if there’s sufficient interest, maybe even some more chapters for the film.

There was a great article in the Baltimore Sun today that both delights me and has me scratching my head.

The article delights me because it reinforces some ideas I already had, and publicly stated some less-known things I already knew. These truths I hold to be self-evident boil down to this: the secret of Pixar’s success has to do with doing things differently than the rest of Hollywood. Basically, they focus on story, tell the stories they want to tell, even if the characters don’t come from the Big Book of Hollywood Licensable Characters, and most importantly, they ignore the Suits, Beancounters and Crystal Ball Gazers to which the rest of the industry seems to have abdicated their creative power. There are highly paid guys at studios, publishers, distributors and labels, who so far as I can see, don’t do anything productive. I mean, they don’t create anything. Their main function seems to be to get between the creatives and the audience and say no to unconventional but good ideas. But that doesn’t occur at Pixar.

The article has me scratching my head, because as I read the words, I couldn’t help wondering why the rest of the moviemaking industry hasn’t tried to copy Pixar. I mean, they have tried to copy Pixar when it comes to character design, rendering technology, and so forth… the nuts and bolts, the technicalities of making any film. The technical exercise, they’ve got down cold, of course, because that’s the easy part. But they haven’t tried to copy Pixar in the sense of How You Make Good Movies, how you ignore the suits and greedy bastards, ignore the people who say “no one wants to see a film about a rat”, and get on to the business of telling real, honest-to-God stories with characters an audience might remember in 10 years, after the toys and tie-ins and Happy Meals are gone.

Anyway, the article is far more eloquent than I, but I will pull out a couple of my favorite passages for your browsing convenience:

“[Up creates] a narrative that operates less like a roller coaster than an old-fashioned merry-go-round, with panels that light up and illuminate the core. And because Pixar is also a director-driven studio, Docter didn’t have to stand for any second-guessing based on executives’ condescending notions of audience expectations or the slanted reactions of recruited focus groups.”

and

“When will the rest of Hollywood learn Pixar’s lessons? When will people realize that “conventional wisdom” is rarely wise at all? Hollywood may be sure to pull in a certain tidy sum with a Kate Hudson or Matthew McConaughey comedy or Nicolas Cage slumming in another comic book or fantasy film, but these movies are just killing time in every way. They build no legacy for the art or the industry and leave no feelings of love or loyalty in an audience.”

As for listening to Suits and Beancounters, if there’s anything I think America and the world would have learned from the whole Financial Meltdown caused by truth-blind managers and short-term-focused beancounters is that listening to that collective group is the absolutely wrong way to go. Please tell me we’ve at least learned that, whether we’re talking about making entertainment, or just running the world.

Michel Gagné allows his imagination to run away with him. Whether creating lavish or bizarre illustrations, comic book epics, or visual design, he leaves the mark of his unique creativity on his work. He’s an artist I admire greatly, and when I had the chance to chat with him recently, I couldn’t pass it up.

OGDEN: Where are you from originally?

GAGNE: I was born in Roberval, and grew up in St-Félicien, two small towns about 2 ½ hours north of Québec City.

OGDEN: How long have you been in the art business?

GAGNE: I started professionally in 1985, but I’ve been doing art my whole life. It’s an obsession.

OGDEN: How do you make your living?

GAGNE: Doing animation, books, comics, commissions, illustrations, licensing designs, selling artwork etc. I make a living being creative and doing what I love.

OGDEN: What artists have inspired you?

GAGNE: There are so many. Here’s a succinct list: Jack Kirby, Eiji Tsuburaya, Steve Ditko, Picasso, Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy, Yerka, Oscar Fishinger, Osamu Tezuka, Miyazaki, Don Bluth, Ishiro Honda, George Lucas, Moebius, writers such as B R Bruss, Richard Adams, H G Wells, Philip Wylie, and many more…

OGDEN: What advice would you give artists just starting out?

GAGNE: Every artist is different and has their path to follow. I didn’t listen to most of the advice that was given to me when growing up so who am I to give advice. I’d say it’s up to each artist to find its own path. Be true to yourself. Set goals and go for them. There are no rules.

OGDEN: How do you think an artist can best cultivate their creativity?

GAGNE: Never sit on your laurels. Keep creating. There are people that come up with one idea and they’ll protect it and stick to it and put the blinders on. I say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Keep an open mind, and be receptive to the potential of creation. There are so many doorways to creativity. I, for one, want to make sure that I remain open-minded enough to go through any of them.

OGDEN: You are an artist who works in a variety of media – comics, animation, illustration. Which do you prefer?

GAGNE: I enjoy all the various media I’ve worked in. What really matters is the project, not the media.

Of course, I tend to favor my own projects over commissioned work, but not always. Sometimes collaborative work is very stimulating.

OGDEN: Your continuing Rex saga is one of my favorite things in the Flight comic anthologies. How much of the whole story do you have outlined?

GAGNE: The full story is figured out. As a matter of fact, I pitched the entire epic to Flight editor, Kazu Kibuishi, last summer and he seemed to really dig it. It has a lot of twists and turns, but the whole thing is going to feel very coherent and unified once I’m done.

OGDEN: How much of the story do you have finished?

GAGNE: I have 78 pages completed and I’ve done 30 pages of rough layouts for the next chapter to be featured in Flight 5.

OGDEN: How long do you think it will take you to complete?

GAGNE: Well, I’ve got 3 more chapters to be published in Flight which comes out annually, so that bring us all the way through 2009. Then, the plan is to publish the full graphic novel the following year with roughly 30 more unpublished pages (prologue and epilogue). I was planning the whole thing to be 160 pages but it might be closer to 200 when I’m done with it.

OGDEN: Zed #8 is just about out. Nice to see you exercising your inner headbanger. How long do you expect this series to be?

GAGNE: I’m pretty sure things will wrap up in issue 10.

OGDEN: How far ahead have you scripted it?

GAGNE: Everything is figured out till the end but I don’t have an exact breakdown of how many pages each passage of the story will take to unfold. It’s all in my head but not on paper yet. But at this point I’m really aiming to finish with issue ten.

OGDEN: Do you have any plans for an animated version of Zed?

GAGNE: I have so many plans in my head I can’t even count them. Plans don’t mean much until the work gets started. Let just say that I remain open to the endless possibilities the animation medium has to offer.

OGDEN: Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets is outstanding. Tell us how that came about. Did Nick come to you?

GAGNE: In the summer of 2004, I started thinking about doing independent animation again, except this time, I wanted one of the big studios to foot the bill for the production cost. After a few weeks of brainstorming, I came up with a concept for a series of short animated films called “Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets”! I was thinking that they would be very short, used a style similar to my book “The Great Shadow Migration”, and be aired as interstitials between programming and commercials.

In the fall 2004, I created a couple of demo films with the help of Vancouver animator Jason Thiessen and flew down to Los Angeles to pitch the idea. I pitched to Cartoon Network, Disney and Nickelodeon all on the same day! All three studios seemed really eager and all said that they would be in contact with me shortly. After a few weeks, I got phone calls from Disney and Cartoon Network turning down the project.

Fortunately, Peter Gal, development director at Nickelodeon brought my pitch package to the folks at MTV Networks in New York who became very interested in the project. They had to get new animation segments for the upcoming “Nickelodeon’s Halloween Shrieking Weekend” programming and they saw Shadow Puppet as a great fit for that. After numerous phone calls and emails, we made a deal.

OGDEN: Did Nick have scripts, or did they ask you to come up with scripts?

GAGNE: Nick had nothing. This was an invitation to do my vision unhampered.

OGDEN: Did they tell you how long they wanted the shorts to be?

GAGNE: I told them I could produce 100 seconds of animation for the budget they were willing to allocate me. They wanted 12 interstitials so the 100-second was divided into various lengths: 5×3 seconds, 3×5 seconds, 2×10 seconds and 2×25 seconds.

OGDEN: How much input did they have in the process?

GAGNE: They had a few comments but they essentially left me to my own device.

OGDEN: How did you go about making ITSP?

GAGNE: I started with illustrations showing how I wanted the final frames to look. Those were all approved by Nickelodeon without any problems.

Then, I went to a website called SoundDogs.com and listened and bought a bunch of sound FX tracks. I gave all the sounds bites to my sound guy, Andrew Scott, who edited them, adding atmospheric sound, echoes and other musical subtleties. We worked back and forth on the track until they had the perfect feel. This was a tedious and exhilarating process at the same time. Andrew must have done 10-15 versions of some of the tracks!

Nickelodeon needed to approve the soundtracks before the animation was started. All the shorts were approved at that stage except the first version of “Nightmare” which they thought was too mean-spirited and horrible to be featured on Children television.

Once the soundtracks were approved, I sent them to Mike Hogue and Jason Thiessen with a series of storyboards of how I wanted the film to look and feel. From my layouts and notes, the animator did the first animation pass and sent me a Quicktime for review. I looked at the films and then called or emailed the animator with precise notes about timing and animation revisions. They did a second pass, and I gave more notes, then a third and so on. We worked back and forth until the short looked perfect to my eye. The animator sometime came up with incredible solutions to my difficult animation challenge. They created animation that was surprising and unexpected.

OGDEN: Do you have any further plans for ITSP? (ie, a book, more animations…?)

GAGNE: With the help of a partner, I’m hoping to bring my insane shadow puppet style to a gaming platform. I’m calling it “Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet”.  I’m really excited about it. I’m also creating animation in a similar style for the upcoming Mixomation show.

OGDEN: What are you doing next?

GAGNE: Well, I just finished a bunch of animation for Brad Bird’s next movie [Ratatouille]. I always enjoy working with Brad and he has a way to get the most out of my animation skills. I can’t really talk about any of the specifics at this time but that’s a project I’m excited to see on the big screen this coming summer.

On the comic front, I’m wrapping up work on “ZED #8″ and I’m about to start illustrating the next chapter of “The Saga of Rex”.

Animation wise I’ve got “Michel Gagné’s Dark Land of Malcovia” and the Mixomation project as discussed earlier. By the summer, I’m hoping to start production on “Sensology”, an abstract animated short film for the Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

There are also several book projects that are in the works. Some have a lot of artwork done already. And through all this, I continue to do illustrations for the trading card game “Xeko”. I feel exhausted just listing all this. No wonder I have no social life!

OGDEN: What do you hope people take away with them after viewing your work?

GAGNE: I hope they like it. That’s about it, really.

I’m not a big fantasy fan in general. However, I do respond well to the Tolkien variety of fantasy. Tolkien told tales set in a lush, imaginative world that was more literate than anything else, and very believable besides. He was a linguist, for heaven’s sake, and an Oxford professor. Such are the things that make a work more than the sum of its parts, and much more than mindless escapism. The themes of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are those of war and peace, sacrifice and friendship, and of course, the notion that good men can conquer Evil, but only if they rise to the occasion. This is good stuff.

Well, a group of Lord of the Rings fans, having worn their various DVD versions of the film down to the nubs, and impatient waiting for Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies to arrive, have gotten together and made a fan film based on the additional source material for Lord of the Rings – those notoriously impenetrable appendices at the end of the books. The Hunt For Gollum tells the story of Strider’s search for the little guy, as told by Tolkein, so we know the story is at least solid, part of the LotR canon, and relevant to the overall story.

I know. I say “fan film” and you can feel the puke rising in your throat, can’t you? You’ve seen one too many poorly done parodies, one too many mashups, one too many Scenes From the Movie with Different Music and/or Dialog Added by a Fan. From all appearances, this one seems different. The production values are high, the production design, music, composition, quality of picture. It’s all similar to the films we know and love. How many fan films have you seen that look like this?

I encourage you to go to the Official Hunt for Gollum website and have a look at the trailer, listen to the music. It all looks very promising, and hard to believe this was put together by a bunch of fans with only a budget of £3000. Not bad at all.

The film will debut online for free viewing (!) on May 3, 2009. Man. People keep giving away great films like this for free, how will anyone ever get paid to make a film again!?

Thanks to Tom Dell’Aringa for the tip