by Adam Phillips

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AN INTERVIEW WITH ADAM PHILLIPS

Adam Phillips, the Australian animator/director behind Waterlollies, is one of two artists whose work is listed on BOTH Flash Animation 10 lists. Back in 2006, Prowlies at the River, the 3rd installment in Adam’s popular Brackenwood series, was listed as #4 on the Most Influential list, an accolade due in no small part to his vast fan base. Phillips’ has a veritable BrackenWoodstock going on every day at Newgrounds.com, the popular Flash animation community that initially helped shed light on his work. He typically has a film amongst the top 10 rated films of all time, and a release at Newgrounds usually results in 2 million or more views for Adam’s Flash-animated episodes.

But it’s not just millions of views that have brought Adam acclaim. He’s also been honored with scores of awards including the Newgrounds Tank Award, a nomination at Annecy, a mention as an official honoree at the 2008 Webby Awards and a handful of rubber, orange arrows from the Flashforward Film Festival.

Phillips’ Brackenwood series is now part of a feature film effort that you can read more about below. For further reading, you can also cast your gaze at his 3-part interview that took place right here at ColdHardFlash.com in 2005. If that interview is too old for you, we’ve cooked up a brand new one.

AARON SIMPSON: Congrats on winning Best Movie at Newgrounds’ 2008 Tank Awards, which was announced last week. Is your trophy cabinet starting to fill up?

ADAM PHILLIPS: It’s dominated by big, orange rubber arrows, but yes there’s now a space issue… in a good way! I’ve decided to build a dedicated shelf here in the office.

AARON: Is there a person in your life who inspired Bitey, the “star” of Waterlollies?

ADAM: Bitey was created to be Bingbong’s arch-nemesis, way back when Bingbong was to be the dead-stupid star of a fairly silly woodland romp. Since Bitey’s popularity took off with his introductory episode, not only his character, but the entire world and history of Brackenwood has developed far beyond what I originally planned. It’s a strange thing, but to me it’s truly like he and the other characters are alive and I’m just a conduit for them to tell their stories. He’s not really inspired by any real life person (though I’m sure we recognise traits in him that we’ve seen in ourselves and/or others), it seems that based on his past he has evolved from a shallow, secondary character to somebody much more complex… to me anyway.

AARON: Of all the characters featured in Waterlollies, which character is your favorite to animate?

ADAM: I’d have to go with the obvious and say Bitey because I really have a lot of fun moving him about. I particularly enjoy experimenting with his poses and facial expressions. He is unique in many ways, for example it’s always a great challenge to portray emotion and thought with such a limited set of facial features. Also with his satyr legs, something like crawling or sitting down is a real exercise in creativity that I love to play with.

Apart from Bitey, I do like to animate prowlies as they’re such unique creatures. You’ve got the eyes and facial expressions, the hands and the expressive tail. It all comes together in a really interesting little package, so they’re also very popular with fans.

AARON: How much experimentation occured before you finalized the timing of Bitey’s fast-moving, running sequences in Waterlollies?

ADAM: At storyboard stage I rough out the key animation poses and try to nail the timing as early as possible, so I usually have the sequence playing back in my head before I start animation. As I work on each scene I stay true to the storyboard but I’m constantly fine-tuning the timing and watching the playback to see how it reads. Sometimes, even after the entire movie is completely finished, I’ll watch the whole thing through and occasionally decide that I can tighten up a sequence by removing some frames or smooth out some action by adding more drawings.

AARON: Do you study nature before animating elements like water and shadows?

ADAM: Absolutely. Well, maybe not so much on a scene-by-scene basis, but the way of the FX animator is to take photographs, video footage and personal experience to build a mental reference library of how stuff works. This is how most animators think anyway – they are keen observers of real life, because only with an intimate knowledge of the real world can you make your drawings and animation appear to be alive.

As a die-hard FX guy, my thoughts are busy with special effects traffic and I find it difficult to see past the effects in any visual medium, from a forest fire on the news to a river rapids sequence in a movie. BBC nature documentaries are essential FX reference!

AARON: What part of the animation process do you find most tedious?

ADAM: While I define ‘tedious’ as time-consuming, boring and/or difficult, I certainly don’t find effects animation tedious even though they can be laborious or complex. They’re a real brain exercise, especially frame-by-frame water reflections of character acting. Any scene that I describe as “a technical nightmare” is really one that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.

For true tedium, it has to be any slow, frame-by-frame character movement, simply because subtle changes over time means a lot of very similar drawings. Additionally, it’s always a very intense process of avoiding line-jiggle and maintaining volumes. To let you in on a little secret, that’s why my shorts generally feature lots of broad action. I find it very difficult, especially with Flash’s relatively unpredictable line, to keep slow movements smooth. There’s nothing worse than watching some subtle character acting, while the outlines jiggle and the volumes morph at the full 30fps.

AARON: You’ve brought on a co-writer for your Brackenwood feature film script. Have you ever collaborated with another writer?

ADAM: No, never. I can write a story, but I’m learning now that a screenplay is a different animal. To date, most of the shorts on my site have been fairly simple ‘scenario’ plot pieces, where a story doesn’t really exist… it’s just a string of simple events leading up to the end joke. Writing the Brackenwood feature with Ryan O’Loughlin (a close friend and colleague from my time with Disney Australia) is a completely new thing for me, not to mention an exciting learning experience. For Brackenwood, I’ve been writing test scenes – including dialogue which is especially unfamiliar territory for me – and showing them to Ryan who pulls them to pieces, giving me critiques and notes. He’s exceptionally talented not only in animation but also in the art of story, so I was amazed when he expressed interest in Brackenwood.

AARON: How far into the story process are you?

ADAM: We’re still talking structure right now. My original naive plan was to tell the history of Brackenwood from start to finish but it was delicately pointed out that this would equate to about 15 hours of screen time. So we’ve started to break it down by identifying the vital plot elements that drive the story. This will eventually be the framework for our screenplay which we should see come in between 90-120 minutes.

AARON: Increased broadband penetration and the advance of sites like YouTube have made native Flash distribution a rarity. You’ve continued to release in a vector format, as you did for Waterlollies. Do you see this continuing for your upcoming films?

ADAM: I’ve continued to release in SWF because my biggest sponsor and supporter is Newgrounds and the legion of loyal Brackenwood fans there. To suddenly turn out the lights on Flash would be alienating 90% of my audience and I’d never want to do that. I had previously announced that Waterlollies was to be the last Brackenwood done in Flash, but since then I’ve decided that I’ll continue to make Brackenwood shorts (albeit more episodic, story-driven ones) for Newgrounds and Bitey Castle. This isn’t to say I won’t be doing any more 10 minute epics. I’m feeling very confident with Toon Boom Digital Pro these days so I’m totally looking forward to making a full-on Brackenwood with it. We’ve even discussed the possibility of using Digital Pro for the Brackenwood feature.

AARON: So we haven’t seen the last of your Flash-animated projects?

ADAM: As long as I have a predominantly SWF audience, I’ll be creating SWF content for my site. Even as my more serious projects outgrow Flash and graduate to Digital Pro, I think I’ll always have the latest Flash installed on my PC for the web stuff. After all these years I find myself, uhm… attached.