The work of British illustration icon Ronald Searle, who passed away two years ago at the age of 91, has influenced countless illustrators, designers, cartoonists, and animators for the past sixty years. One of the artists who can claim to being inspired is veteran story artist Matt Jones, who works at Pixar by day and curates the Ronald Searle Tribute blog by night.
What sets Matt apart from the average fan is that he became friends with Searle during the last years of his life, visiting him numerous times in the south of France and exchanging frequent letters. Now, Jones has hatched a plan to shine greater attention onto Searle’s work in the United States by staging the first-ever West Coast art show of Searle’s artwork. The show, “Searle in America,” will exhibit the drawings that Searle made in America while on reportage assignments for Holiday magazine, like this view of American sailors in Honolulu:
…or this view of a slot player in Las Vegas:
Jones is collaborating on the exhibit with San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum. However, the cost of shipping Searle’s artwork from Europe and printing a catalogue are prohibitively expensive for the non-profit museum. To help raise money for the show, they are organizing an auction of new illustrations and paintings inspired by Searle. The Cartoon Art Museum will begin the auction later this month on eBay and all the money raised will go directly toward the costs of presenting the show.
I’m rooting for them to pull this off because it’ll provide a benefit to the entire visual arts community on the West Coast who will have an opportunity to see Searle’s original artwork. Jones is inviting artists to mail their own Searle-inspired contributions for the auction by July 15th. For more details, you can contact him via this page.
Here’s a preview of some of the artwork that will be auctioned, a lot of it which is created by artists who work in the animation industry:
It’s the time of year when many of our student readers are finishing up their student films, and inevitably there will be lots of questions: Should I submit my film to festivals? Should I post my film online? Will posting my film online hurt my festival chances? Avner Geller, the co-director of the Student Academy Award-winning short Defective Detective, has shared his personal experiences dealing with these issues in this must-read blog post. He addresses the myth that festivals disqualify filmmakers if a film is posted online, however, Avner points out that both the Student Academy Awards and SIGGRRAPH’s Computer Animation Festival require filmmakers to keep their films off the Internet. Take heed of that advice if qualifying for either of those events is part of your gameplan.
Also, I shouldn’t let this moment pass without pointing out that Geller’s film debuted online last year as part of Cartoon Brew’s Student Animation Festival. It has been the most viewed film in our festival with over 425,000 views to date. We’ll be launching the 2012 edition of the student animation festival shortly—stay tuned to Cartoon Brew for submission details.
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Defective Detective is the week two film in our Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival. It’s directed by Avner Geller and Stevie Lewis from Ringling College of Art and Design. To comment on the film, read their production notes, or watch their Student Academy Award acceptance speech, click HERE.
Cartoon Brew’s second annual Student Animation Festival is made possible through the generous support of Titmouse and JibJab.
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We’re proud to present the second film in this year’s Student Animation Festival: Defective Detective directed by Avner Geller and Stevie Lewis at the Ringling College of Art and Design. Every aspect of the production is done to a high professional standard, but to us, the film also illustrates the value of CG filmmakers who are well versed in traditional drawing and painting. Visit the blogs of Geller and Lewis, and you’ll discover two artists with a solid knowledge of design, drawing and color, and that knowledge is well applied throughout their film. The seamless integration of hand-drawn sequences was also a novel touch that we enjoyed.
Geller is currently working at Pixar, Lewis is at DreamWorks. Here is a video from a few weeks ago of the duo accepting a Student Academy Award, and below, dressed up as their characters from the film:
They provided us with the following notes about the production of Defective Detective:
It took about a year to complete the film from the story development until it was rendered and done. The film is mostly done in 3D. The program at Ringling focuses on 3D computer animation, and the course of study take you through all the stages of production, from the story and design stages, through Modeling, Animation and Lighting. In the first two years we take course in traditional hand drawn animation, and when we got to work on our film, we knew we wanted to incorporate that in some sort of way. The Detective’s dream sequences were a perfect opportunity to use a different technique that will take the viewers through a unique experience.
We weren’t very familiar with this style of storytelling and cinema, and had to do a lot of research. Learning more about the world in which the film takes place was one of the most fun stages of production. We collected a lot of picture reference of old apartments in France and studied different kinds of furniture and appliances that were used during that time. We watched a lot of film noir movies and were inspired by the tone and style of detective films. Once you immerse yourself in a certain world you start recognizing new references that relate to it everywhere. For instance we started to see detective images and caricatures everywhere even when we weren’t looking.
The Music for the film was composed by Raphael Beau, who wrote the music for Micmacs (directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who also directed Amelie). We really loved his work and sent him a version of our film in very early stage. Luckily he saw the potential in it and agreed to write music for us. We were extremely happy and he did such a fantastic job. From the very first draft he sent us it was clear that we are on the same wavelength, and it was pleasure working with him. The sound design was done by Clement Maleo (who worked on Gobelins, l’école de l’image film, Burning Safari) and he was also great to work with. He was very particular about every little nuance in the film and really brought it to life through sound.
It was a fantastic experience to work on this film. Animation is such a long and tedious process sometimes and it’s a really unique feeling to see how it all came together at the end. Even though it was hard to see the film through fresh eyes because we watched it so many times, we still loved watching and working on the film even until the very end. We really enjoyed working together and we hope to collaborate on more projects in the future.
Filmmaker Websites
Avner Geller
Stevie Lewis
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