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An MTV Animation studio alum who worked on the television shows Beavis & Butt-head and Daria,
Brooklyn-based
Willy Hartland is an independent animator and storyboard artist who experiments with combining digital animation with clay models and cut-out techniques. His new ten-minute short film,
New York City: An Animated Sketchbook is the subject of today’s
Crowdfund Friday. It’s quite literally a living sketchbook of everyday life in the big city:
“The genesis for the film happened organically, growing out of the thousands of sketches I’ve done of New Yorkers over the past several years. Drawings of urban life as seen in subways, parks, cafes, bars, basically anywhere people will sit still long enough to capture with my quick contour line. Places where the dynamism of the city is evident and part of the concrete jungle that is the visceral pulse of a thriving city.”
The finished film will incorporate Cinema 4D, Flash and cut-out animation. With four minutes of the film already in the can, Hartland is asking for $17,500 to finish animation with an animation assistant, post-production, and to hire a sound designer and music composer. The campaign is currently at $7,896 with 26 days left to go. Rewards include signed DVDs of the completed film, original artwork, and the opportunity to appear as an animated extra.
It used to be that the only place animation could be screened was on a rectangular screen, be it a large theatrical screen, or more modest TV and computer screens. Things are changing though. Today, animation is projected onto irregularly-shaped three-dimensional buildings and trees in nature. It’s painted on subway tunnels where it can be viewed from a moving subway car. And now, thanks to MonkeyLectric, animation can be seen on bicycle wheels:
Over the past few years, the small Berkeley, California-based company has developed a number of prototypes. The Monkey Light Pro Bicycle Wheel Display System is their most advanced product to date with over 256 full-color LEDs on each wheel. Their system allows users to upload approximately 90 seconds of animation in a variety of media formats including AVI, MPEG, MOV, Quicktime, and FLV, and to display it to the public while riding a bike.
To start manufacturing the Monkey Light Pro, they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign with a funding goal of $180,000 by July 21st. They’ve already raised over $68,000 during the first three days of the campaign. The lights aren’t cheap—prices range from $495 to $795 per wheel depending at what stage of the campaign the product is ordered—but that’s a small price to pay to advance animation beyond the rectangular screen and share it throughout the city streets.
Director and animator Ken Mundie, who is in his late-’80s, is probably the oldest animator to date who has used Kickstarter. The project he’s pitching is something he’s been working on for years called The Match. Here’s a short test from the project for which he’s aiming to raise $10,000.
Mundie has had a fascinating career in Hollywood, walking the mainstream-indie tightrope for much of it. He is perhaps best known for directing the 1969 Fat Albert pilot, which has absolutely nothing to do with the Filmation crud that followed and ranks as one of the greatestn TV specials in animation history.
One of his indie shorts, The Door (1967), was released by Warner Bros. in 1967:
He did lots of film and TV series titles like The Wild Wild West:
While working on lesser projects in Hollywood, he always did personal projects on the side, like this adapation of Homer’s The Odyssey which he was never able to get off the ground:
It’s exciting to see him with the desire to finish an animated film at such an advanced age. According to the Kickstarter, his son is assisting him, and they’re aiming to complete by September 2014. Unfortunately, the project is poorly set up and is basically a “what not to do” for crowdfunding. Every newbie Kickstarter mistake has been made, though it’s not too late to fix many of these issues. Just some of the issues:
- It’s set up by someone who isn’t Ken Mundie and who hasn’t made his relationship to Mundie clear.
There have been no updates in the first week.
There’s no video of Ken Mundie explaining his project (seeing a ‘grand old man’ of the industry describe his project in person would have made a crucial difference.)
It doesn’t offer the finished film as a reward.
The descriptions of what the money will accomplish are vague. (They say the money will complete the ‘first act,’ but is that a stand-alone short and of what length?
Even with these reservations, I felt the project was worthy of being highlighted because Mundie’s animation tests look phenomenal and the man is one of the unheralded renegades of the American animation industry.
Winning an Oscar for best animated short can do many things for a filmmaker’s career, but it does not guarantee an endless stream of funding for the remainder of their lives. That is why Oscar-winning English director Daniel Greaves has turned to Kickstarter to fund his next project Mr. Plastimime. Greaves and London-based Tandem Films are asking for £33,450 (approx. $51,000). They have reached more than two-thirds of their goal with less than a week left in the campaign.
Greaves won the Oscar in 1992 for his short film Manipulation:
His new short Mr. Plastimime mixes clay animation with hand-drawn facial expressions and CG backgrounds. Greaves often mixes animation techniques in his work, such as in his well-received short Flatworld:
The rewards packages are well considered, and include artwork from the earlier films Manipulation and Flatworld. The new short Mr. Plastimime also appears to be well into production at this point. The project updates on Kickstarter show an impressive amount of visual development and dedicated craftsmanship, including hand-animated pencil tests by Greaves.
As most Cartoon Brew readers are aware by now, we’ve had a “no crowdfunding” policy in place for a long time. But times change, and as more animation filmmakers incorporate crowdfunding into their production plans, we feel that it’s necessary to provide a platform for noteworthy projects that need funding. Starting today, we’re going to try something new by featuring a curated selection of crowdfunded animation projects on Fridays. We especially aim to give exposure to promising animation that may slip through the cracks due to a lack of exposure in mainstream media.
For starters, I’d like to highlight WONDER 365 Animation Project by Japanese filmmaker Mirai Mizue. Mizue creates his abstract films the old-school way by drawing and painting onto paper, but he uses digital compositing techniques to fantastic effect:
If you follow Mizue on Vimeo, you know that he’s been working diligently on WONDER 365 for the past 365 days in a row. Mizue received a grant from the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan, which allowed him to hire over 150 painters to help color the film, but he’s still looking for funding to complete the music recording and post production.
The Wonder 365 crowdfunding effort continues through April 30. The project is currently 22% funded. Here is the film’s trailer:
