I like to check CGsociety’s forums fairly often. Every now and then I come across something there that is fairly inspiring. (Although I must admit, I come across a lot of uninspiring things there as well.)

 In any case, I came across a film made by Tim Marchant called “Tidy Monster”. I think what really inspired me was the simplicity of the execution. You can watch it on Tim’s site and the film is on youtube here.

 Before I go on, I’d like to clarify what I mean by “simplicity”. I guess the term could be interpreted in many ways. I certainly do not mean that the film was simple; I mean, rather, to emphasize the fact that the visuals did not try to overpower or convolute the idea behind the film. Given the dialog in “Tidy Monster”, I think many animators/filmmakers would tend to try to cram as many insane visuals into the piece as they could. It is this kind of thinking often leads films deep into the ground. Humor me as I indulge in an analogy:

Let’s say we were making soup. First we should probably decide what kind of soup we want to make- we may call this the idea behind the soup (I know… reaaaaally subtle). There are numerous possibilities as far as types of soup, but for the purposes of this metaphor, and because I am a vegetarian… we’re going to make some delicious broccoli cheddar soup. Now we heat up some water, we prepare the pot and we put in the basic ingredients- essentially we give the soup a basic structure and context. So far so good…

Now its time to really make it taste gooooood. So what do we do? We find EEEEverything we like and we toss it in!! You like hot-dogs? In they go! How about some pancakes with loads of syrup? Throw’em in! I know, FRIED snickers bars… they’re all the rage- what the hell- toss a dozen of those in! And ice-cream goddammit… loads of ice-cream. Oh man oh man oh man oh man YEEEESSSSS!

Anybody want some soup?

The point I’m trying to make is putting a lot of “cool” stuff together does not make a good soup… errr… film. As much as we love those fried snickers bars, we need to cut them out if they do not point the audience toward something vital to the film’s idea. The idea is key… and sorry, no amount of technical goodies will ever replace the idea. At least not for me.

Anyway, I’m going to go vomit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Short Films, Websites, Animators, Video clips, Animation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.