Join the Animated Conversation

In this week’s 4mations interview, Joseph Pierce tells us about ‘A Family Portrait’ the short film he is currently producing with fiftynine productions. He gives us secrets, jealousy, and suspicion! Read on.

You’ve followed an interesting path to animation. How has your background fed into your work?

Well in my late teens I worked on live-action films with a strong sense of social-realism, I was also heavily into contemporary art, mostly video and installation. I discovered animation almost by accident during my degree course, and I guess I like to create work that people can indentify with, that has a grounding in reality yet can be taken somewhere unexpected. That’s why I’m really into rotoscoping, because you have the actors performance as the ‘reality’ and the animation adds an extra layer. And also because I can’t draw very well unless I’m tracing!

Your film is about a professional family portrait session going horribly wrong. Are you drawing from personal experience?

Er, not really, I was too young to remember my own that well, but they were the classic straight back/forced smile/painted bookcase ones, which I really like! I was quite fascinated with these modern ones where the dad’s giving piggy-backs or they’re having a tug-of-war which I find slightly embarrassing. I always thought, what if the family had an off day, or one of them wasn’t really into it? Hats off to the photographers though.

Any particularly bad personal snapshots you’d like to share with us?

Do you mean literally share? I’m a little too repressed to post one, although I’ve been toying with the idea of  sending one to awkwardfamilyphotos.com but I’m not sure it’s quite awkward enough. Let’s just say it features my three siblings and mum with a Arnie Schwarzenegger waxwork. Ahem. Watch this space.

I’m already creeped out by your visuals. How are you going to bring them to life?

Like I said it’s a loose form of rotoscoping which means drawing over live-action footage. It’s pretty painful and involves printing out every other frame, drawing over it with a pen, colouring in ink, scanning it and laying out on the computer. I’ve previously done it directly on the computer with a wacom tablet but this time, to get a more textural aesthetic I’m working on paper. The animation really comes to life when it’s exaggerated and strays from the rotoscoping, otherwise it’s too realistic.

You mentioned the Awkward Family Photos blog. Do you have a favourite?

This website is probably the best thing to appear since the birth of computers. I was amazed when my producer emailed it to me, it’s obviously right up my street. A favourite? There’s too many to choose (and some of the comments are just as funny) but for beginners I recommend the classic, ‘The Choker’, ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ and the irresistible ‘Mommy-the-Pooh‘.