Alex Dron, who was featured here back in November, is up for the Kiwi Award, which will highlight the top film from New Zealand. His short Fot is up against Mukpuddy’s Sparkle Friends – go vote!

Chris Harding is a 34 year old Flash animator living in Kansas City. He’s a Mac guy and he’s currently animating with Flash 8. His favorite website is mcsweeneys.net, and, at the moment, his favorite animated film is Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro Non Troppo. Here’s a clip from this 1977 film.

AARON SIMPSON: Which animated film are you best know for?

CHRIS HARDING: That would probably be Learn Self Defense. It was brought on by this theory we had in the US in 2001-2004 that somehow we could fight our way to safety. That all the evil could be destroyed and the world would be safe. So I made a thing about it, and I just self-distributed it in festivals and such. It never really got picked up very much commercially, but it did play in a lot of theaters around the world.

AARON: Here’s a clip from Learn Self Defense:

AARON: And here’s a tutorial Chris assembled which details the creation of a scene from Learn Self Defense:

AARON: Do you prefer to work alone on your original projects?

CHRIS: I prefer working alone 99% of the time. But there are a few people I’ve collaborated with that I love working with and hope to again.

AARON: How do your projects typically begin? Do you draw or write first?

CHRIS: I’m more into the writing, even though I really love to draw. The frame by frame work can be tedious. But I think the results are great enough (or potentially great enough) to keep doing it.

AARON: How do you find the motivation to work on your original material after a long day at work?

CHRIS: The only way for me to motivate myself is with ideas. If I’m in love with an idea enough, and I can’t communicate that idea by any other method I feel the strong need to animate it.

AARON: Do characters need to talk?

CHRIS: The short I’m working on now has no dialogue. So filled a notebook with sketches – hundreds of pages. It’s a lot of fun to get away from so much dialogue and do something completely visual with music.

AARON: Tell us more about this new project.

CHRIS: I’m currently working on an untitled short on the subject of making a living. It features robots.

AARON: While we await that revelation of the title, let’s watch a quick tutorial on how you built the head components for this short:

AARON: And you’ve also given us a sneak peek at a scene from this upcoming short, which is below:

AARON: How do you promote yourself as an artist?

CHRIS: Since I have a full-time day job, all this animation work is done for love. So I’m picky about what I take on. I have a rep– Duck Studios– that looks for projects and stuff. But I don’t work that much. All day I work on other peoples’ projects, so when I’m home I’d normally rather be telling a story that means something to me. Very selfish.

AARON: Is there a part of the animation process you’d like to have done for you?

CHRIS: It’s difficult to imagine doing that. I am a control freak. In some ways it’s like asking what part of parenthood I would out-source.

AARON: About how many seconds can you animate on a good day?

CHRIS: There are days when I can animate 30 seconds. Other days, I sit and stare at the screen. Sometimes I am afraid to even look at or think about my work if I’m stuck or frustrated.

AARON: How long did it take you to learn Flash?

CHRIS: I’d say I started getting the hang of it after a few months.

AARON: What’s been your experience with animation festivals?

CHRIS: I’ve screened in a bunch, but only attended a few. I had a great time and would go to more if I could. They’re great for going directly to an audience. But as I understand it, only a handful really help you commercially– in that you might get any kind of distribution or broadcast deal. But it’s wonderful to think of all those people watching your short on a big screen.

AARON: Do you find the paperless 2D animation process faster than traditional animation?

CHRIS: I suspect it’s much more efficient. But I’ve never really done it any other way.

AARON: Do you use a Wacom tablet?

CHRIS: I use a Wacom a lot now, but it has been a very long transition. I used to draw everything on paper, scan it in, and trace it. But I’ve slowly gotten the hang of drawing right on the computer. I tape a sheet of vellum over my Wacom surface so it’s more like I’m drawing on paper. The added friction feels more natural but wears out your stylus tips over time.

AARON: Has the web helped your career?

CHRIS: As with all of us on the internet, it has made me into a giant celebrity, and obscenely wealthy. It’s also guaranteed to increase your penis size. (OK, actually it’s helped a LOT. It’s a great way to go straight to your audience.)

AARON: What online resources do you rely on?

CHRIS: Without A Box, Cartoon Brew, Cold Hard Flash, WordPress, The Animation Show.

AARON: What recommendations can you offer to animators just starting out?

CHRIS: If you are planning on writing your own cartoons, you should read a hell of a lot of books and watch a lot of films that aren’t animated. Treat your audience with respect, and they will do the same.

Learn Self Defense
by Chris Harding
Chris is a Cold, Hard Flash regular, and his career and techniques were chronicled back in February of this year. Chris offers this synopsis of the 5-minute ‘Learn Self Defense’ on his website – “After being brutally attacked in an alley, George decides he must learn to protect himself. A cocksure narrator walks him through five practical lessons of self-defense for the citizen on the go– or nation-state on the rampage!” This short is not available on the web, but Chris gave me an opportunity to watch the film and it’s simply excellent. ‘Learn Self Defence’ is slick, stylized and irreverently funny. Check out clips on Chris’ site, and while you’re there Coming into the Flash Film Festival, Chris is on a roll, having just won the Best of the Fest award at the 2005 Kansas City Filmmakers’ Jubilee.

The Adventures of Mr. Coo
by Nacho Rodriguez
Nacho lives in Barcelona, Spain, and he’s animated one of the most entertaining Flash shorts in recent memory. Mr. Coo, a large-nosed, shape-shifting blob, finds himself being chases by his own paper airplane, a savage chair and a toilet that acts more like a xerox machine. There’s an enormously high drawing count in ‘The Adventures of Mr. Coo,’ and it’s almost hard to believe it was all animated by one man. The 25-year old Rodriguez also has extremely strong timing and imagination – he’s essentially Spain’s answer to animation autuers like Don Hertzfeldt and Bill Plympton. I simply love this short, and I can’t wait to see the next in the series, which is reportedly under way.

Manege Frei
by Dyrdee
‘Manege Frei’ is a contemplative Flash short that acts as a metaphor for what we want and what we actually end up doing to get it. ‘Manege Frei’ was animated at the German Urban Design and Communicatiosn company Dyrdee. It’s beautifully designed, and animated quite elaborately. The painted bitmap grass texture adds a nice touch, and the linework is gorgeous. The lighting, the shadows, the color palette – there’s so much to love, I recommend you just stop reading this now and watch.

Taggerz
by Jamie Cason
‘Taggerz’ is an episodic Flash-animated project that follows the Ruffneck Crew, a group of UK graffiti artists. The website offers the following tag – “When your crew is your family, you better hope they’ve got your back.” ‘Taggerz’ is behind a firewall on the BBC site, but it only takes a minute to sign-up, and a working email doesn’t seem to be neccessary.

Now that you’ve watched them all, head on over to the Flash Film Festival site and vote on your favorite. Best of luck to all in the competition.

LEARN SELF DEFENSE
SHORT FILM CATEGORY
I profiled Chris Harding’s work a few months back, and it’s great to see his latest receiving more praise. Originally premiering yesterday at the 2005 SXSW Film Festival, ‘Learn Self Defense,’ “is a basic how-to guide for anyone interested in personal safety and/or world domination.” Well done, Chris, and best of luck in France.

TISM – “EVERYONE HAS HAD MORE SEX THAN ME”
MUSIC VIDEO CATEGORY
Bernard Derriman’s sex-addled bunny has been spinning around the internet like wildfire – crossing my email inbox a good half-dozen times. And now this Flash-animated music video for the band TISM makes the jump into competition at Annecy. I also profiled Bernard’s short back in February regarding his entry into ‘The Greatest Story Never Told‘ animation competition. Congrats again, Bernard!

I recently posted the first half of an interview with Chris Harding, one of the brilliant minds behind the recently honored ‘Robot Family’ shorts. In the second half of our interview, we learn what inspires Chris, what he’s watching, who he’s teaming up with, and what we’ll see next from this immensely talented comic-artist-turned-animator.

AS: What and who inspires your work?



CH: There are so many great things. Animation-wise, I’m a big fan of Don Hertzfeldt. His writing is amazing. He takes animation to a very high level, even though – or maybe because – he draws stick figures. My favorite regular film director is Stanley Kubrick. There was a show on the BBC called ’The Office’that was gold.

Maybe the best inspiration comes from books.



I usually read non-fiction, but lately I’ve been reading Terry Southern. The nice thing about books is that they don’t translate directly into animation. You need to take in the ideas, mix them with your own, and then find ways of representing them visually instead of through words. I like the idea of being inspired by one medium, and translating your thoughts into another.

AS: Which animated TV shows are on your viewing calendar?



CH: Maybe it’s weird. I hardly watch any animation on TV. My favorite was probably ‘Home Movies’ on Adult Swim. ‘King of the Hill’ is really well done. Of course, ‘The Simpsons’ is great. And there are lots of shows on that are beautiful to look at. But I like shows that don’t have jokes, and the characters are just earnest and serious as they commit these ridiculous acts. I think I’ve had my fill of sitcom style witty banter and stories that resolve through a climactic battle.

I love watching cartoons for enjoyment. But when I’m working on my own stuff I don’t watch much. There are ten million animators who are much more skilled than me. But when I’m looking for new ideas to process into my own work, I can’t get it from other animation without being derivative. Almost like I’d rather not see too much of someone else’s style so I won’t be tempted to follow it. A lot better inspiration comes from regular life or books, because it’s raw material.

AS: How do you keep your Flash skills sharp?

CH: Just using it 26 hours a day seems to do the trick. Sometimes you get to where you see the whole world in vector shapes. You look at a tree and wonder how huge a file that must be.

AS: What’s the deal with Goldhouse Creative?



CH: Goldhouse used to be a full-time Web animation company. We (Jeff, Chad, and I) did a lot of client work. But now we live in three different cities, so it’s more a name we put on projects we are collaborating on — mainly ‘Robot Family,’ as of late. All three of us are always busy with our own projects as well. On the happy occasions we get together on something, we call that Goldhouse.

AS: The greeting cards you display in your online portfolio are hysterical, in particular, I just love ‘Screaming Banshee.’ What was your first animated greeting card project?



CH: I think it was about a guy who opens a barrel and all these monkeys jump out and attack him. The idea was that a barrel of monkeys wouldn’t actually be all that much fun in reality. This e-card was done for Hallmark, and may still be on the web site.

AS: When you’re not animating for TV animation festivals, where do you work?



CH: I work for Hallmark, actually. And then I go home and put about equal time into my own work. I like making shorts just for the joy it. ‘Learn Self Defense’ is about to start playing in festivals, starting at South by Southwest.

AS: What type of team is involved on a greeting card project?

CH: We have a producer who is responsible for planning the big picture of the selection of e-cards. Then each card is usually executed by one artist, from writing, to animation, to sound. That’s the great thing about learning animation this way. You learn the whole process, and get to do your own thing. You get to try lots of little experiments in storytelling because you crank through so many.

AS: I’ve read that the typical e-card consumer is young, male and ‘edgy.’ The cards you display on your site seem to offer proof of this concept. Is this your ideal audience?

CH: I don’t know. That may be true. The ones on my site just happen to be some favorites. I’m male and relatively young-ish, so maybe it’s a coincidence. Writing greeting cards is a very strange business, and I definitely don’t have enough of a handle on it to aim at a particular audience.

AS: You live only a few hours away from Walt Disney’s childhood home in Marceline, Missouri. Does this banal fact somehow make you his creative heir?



CH: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, h- no. I used to live about a block from the original studio. A few years ago they had a screening of a documentary about Ub Iwerks (the guy who actually designed Mickey Mouse and animated all the early films) to raise funds to restore the old building. I’m in awe of Iwerks. As I understand it, Disney was more or less the business genius, and Ub made the films–which were wonderful back then.

Leaving out any comparisons of ability, I’d say I identify more with Iwerks. I am an idiot when it comes to marketing. I like sitting in a dark room for months on end making my little people move around the screen.

AS: Thanks for the interview, Chris. I look forward to seeing ‘Miracle & Wonder,’ and many, many more episodes of ‘Robot Family.’

The Nicktoons Film Festival recently concluded, and amongst the finalists for the Grand Prize was a quirky, dialogue-driven short titled, ‘Robot Family.’ The two-minute short was directed by Kansas’ very own Chris Harding, a Flash animation maestro who’s no stranger to the festival circuit. Chris and his two college buddies, Chad Strawderman and Jeff Barfoot, hatched and developed the idea – get this – while working in three different cities. If that’s not a testament to the collaborative benefits of the internet, I don’t know what is. That’s not to say there hasn’t been a price for their success. Mr. Harding is a Flash man by day, a Flash man by night, and, as you can see in the adjacent photo, a Flash man at 4 in the morning. Read on to find out what he and his computer are brewing up after the clock strikes midnight.

AARON SIMPSON: Where did you study, or first learn, animation?

CHRIS HARDING: I studied illustration at the University of Arizona. Starting in college, I did a daily comic strip (‘Feet of Clay’) for about 5 years. This is where I learned what little I know about writing, which I think is important. Later, I started trying to teach myself animation. I think it’s the most beautiful art form ever devised. But I haven’t had any formal classes or anything.

AS: How did you discover Macromedia’s Flash software?
CH: Through a gig making e-cards. I picked up Flash maybe 5 years ago, when it became ubiquitous on the Web.

AS: Have you ever animated using other software?
CH: Before Flash, I was using Director. I came at this from a Web animation background. But Flash isn’t limited to that anymore. It can be great for TV, film, anything…

AS: Who typically animates the bulk of the scenes in your projects?
CH: Everything on my site was pretty much made by me. ‘Robot Family’ is a collaboration with Chad Strawderman and Jeff Barfoot – very much a shared effort at the big picture level. But when it comes to sitting down and making each piece, so far it’s just one guy in a basement. I made the ‘Slick Salesman’ short. Chad is working on the next piece in his basement right now.

AS: ‘Robot Family’ is marked by some excellent timing and dialogue editing – what’s your process during the animatic stage?

CH: Thank you for saying so. Actually, this short in its finished form is not much more than an animatic. Very unsophisticated animation. It was done to test how the characters interact. The timing was a matter of editing and slicing up Chad’s perfect performance as the salesman, and juggling it around in the timeline until it sounded right. Timing is really, really important. Animation has more in common with music than drawing. A nice thing about Flash is how easily you can make adjustments to time.

AS: ‘Robot Family’ has that ‘TV series’ flavor we all enjoy so much. In light of your success in the recent Nicktoons Film Festival, is this your goal with the project?

CH: I think so. ‘Robot Family’ is our first attempt at trying to build a series, which is a whole different thing than telling a self-contained story. You try to set up a world, and then hope you can squeeze whatever is on your mind that week into a show idea. So I want it to be a broad, deep, versatile reflection of reality. I don’t think I could work, for example, with a wacky idea like “Zombie Dentist,” or something. It’s funny on the surface, but I couldn’t write through the point of view of that character for very long.

The rule for Robot Family is that it’s about people — unthinking people. Robots are a great device, but we try to avoid robot-related jokes unless they pertain to something a human would go through. Like we might have a robot rusting, but through their eyes it would be cancer.

Another nice thing about robots is that they like to maintain a status-quo. Their fragile society depends on it. So it’s very natural for each episode to end where it began, as is customary on TV. Also, we tried very hard to design the look so that it could be drawn by anyone. It’s almost absent of style.

AS: Are there any more ‘Robot Family’ episodes in the pipeline?

CH: Chad is working on one right now. I hope I’m not spoiling it to talk about it. The mom, Debbie, accidentally replaces her sex-drive with a heavy-duty washing machine part. That sounds like a robot gag, but it’s really about a cruel joke on humanity — the huge gap in sexual desire between men and women. Robots are very traditional, so when Mom’s drive becomes powerful, the entire robot universe is thrown out of whack.

AS: The backgrounds in your short ‘Learn Self Defense’ are amazing. Did you paint them traditionally, and import them into the software?

CH: Thank you. I actually did all of those in Photoshop. You can download or make all kinds of crazy brushes out of almost anything now. You can tear a wrinkly piece of paper, scan it in, and paint with it. So I got all these distressed textures that way. It’s 100% digital, but done in lots of layers the way a painting would be.

AS: You’ve explained that your next personal project, ‘The Days of Miracle and Wonder,’ is a modern retelling of the John Henry folktale. Do you see yourself harnessing technology or dying trying to beat it?
CH: I see myself dying trying to harness technology. Dying in a basement late at night, half blind from staring at a monitor. ‘Miracle & Wonder’ is something I’ve been working on for a while. It probably won’t be the next thing I finish, but I’ll get it done one day.

‘The Ballad of John Henry’ is a great story. There are all these subtle social issues. My particular version is told from the point of view of the man who built the machine, with the best intentions of freeing people from crappy, laborious work. He finds out that the short-term consequences are people losing their jobs.

END OF PART 1

Check back soon to read the second half of my interview with ‘Robot Family’s Chris Harding.

Robot Family: The Slick Salesman by Chris Harding

Just this morning, I posted my thoughts on this short. I completely agree with this short being included as a finalist – it’s a standout, and I’d love to see this series extend to a DVD compilation or a primetime show. Good luck, guys!

Kenya by Jonti Picking

Over a dozen shorts in the competition were animated in Flash. This comes as no surprise, as Flash has become one of the most commonly used production methods, especially for animated pilots. The program’s ease of use, flexibility and relatively low price tag (approx. $500) makes it a no-brainer for teams all around the world.

Congratulations to the creators of the festival winner, ‘Timmy’s Lessons in Nature,’ and the Producer’s Choice Award, ‘Welcome to My Life.’

I’ll start with ‘Robot Family,’ a short created by Chris Harding, and his pals Chad Strawderman and Jeff Barfoot at Goldhouse Creative. I’ve seen Chris’ work before, and I especially like ‘Make Mine Shoebox,’ a series of video greetings Chris, according to his site, produced for Hallmark to screen at corporate gatherings.

‘Robot Family’ seems to be part of a series of shorts that Goldhouse Creative is assembling. The episode included in the festival can be seen (well, almost) in an earlier stage of development on the robotfamily.com site. The short was once titled ‘Phone Sales,’ but the version in the festival has been renamed ‘The Slick Salesman.’

The Nicktoons site doesn’t list this is a Flash production in their notes, but the ID card preceeding the the short does (that’s why I didn’t include this in my Festival write-up earlier in the month). It looks as if Goldhouse is also using 3D software to generate the minimalist, blueprint-esque backgrounds. It’s a unique blend of design ethics – the robot’s world is very exact, colorless and dull. The robots, on the other hand, are bursting with color, fun timing, and loose, playful design.

The show is, as the title suggests, about a robot family, and in this short, the brood is in the middle of dinner when the phone rings. Dad answers, and winds up in an all-too-familiar, one-sided conversation with a fast-talking salesman. The dialogue editing is very tight, and this is where the laughs really kick in. It’s a short short, but the timing is spot on, and the performances are understatedly clever. There’s no big story here, no twists or surprise endings – it’s about the performances and simple, stylistic designs. I was left wanting more, which I guess is a good thing, especially when it looks as if that’s the team’s plan.