The Pictoplasma festival in Berlin this year consisted of the Character Walk, Screenings, Lectures, Workshops and Concerts/Performances/Parties. For me there was an awful lot to cram in in a very short space of time, despite arriving on the Monday I was due to catch an early flight home Friday afternoon. Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to exploring a bit of Berlin and checking out the street art, some of which created by the well known artist Blu, the shear scale of some of artwork on the side of the buildings makes you appreciate the lengths the artist would have had to go to in order to simply get the paint on the walls.
The festival itself didn’t actually kick into action until the Wednesday which meant I had two and a half days to absorb as much as I could from Pictoplasma which began with collection our Pictoplasma wrist bands and then the character walk.
The Character Walk & Exhibitions
We signed up and received our festival wrist bands on the Wednesday, none of the lectures or screenings would begin until Thursday which gave an opportunity (or challenge) to explore all of the 24 exhibitions on the character walk, I managed to see everything by the end of the day with the exception of the Pictarot tarot reading which meant I could get the most out of the screenings and lectures over the next day and a half.
I have visually catalogued my Pictoplasma/Berlin experience in a separate booklet but the exhibitions and artists that inspired me the most were:
ROMAN KLONEK
This Polish artist produces some fantastic woodcuts, to me the characters are secondary to the overall feeling you get from the colours and the Russian/East European styling and the natural imperfections associated with woodcut art, the flat blocks of colour and the use of limited colours again associated with the process works really well with the relatively simple characters. I have also always loved the use of Russian letter forms, there’s something appealing about text that looks so familiar and year also as though it’s from another planet. The content of his artwork is pretty crazy, who know’s what’s going on or where his influences for each idea are from, but if they were drawn on a computer in vector form then they would not have the charm or character they hold as woodcuts. Though apparently some of his work produced for certain publications are literally drawn on the computer with a woodcut effect added afterwards. It’s a style that could be considered and applied to an animation in the future maybe.
ANNA HRACHOVEC
I simply liked this because it was perhaps one of the last things I’d have expected to have found here, and yet making characters from knitwear must be just as an obvious medium as any other may or may not be. There seems to be a lot of animations being used in advertising which feature characters running about on overly small worlds and I guess the creations of Anna Hrachovec use these kind of small planets in this exhibition demonstrate her characters in an alternate parallel medium?
THE BLACKHEART GANG
These guys were quite an inspiration to me during our cut-out animation module and so I was really looking forward to seeing some of their work close up. The level of detail and multiple layers and combination of 2D 3D and live action demonstrated what could be achieved using what were really simple techniques. Unfortunately I was heading to the airport at the point when Ree Treweek was due to do her presentation. But I did get to see and speak with her earlier that morning at her exhibition she was very nice and it was quite amusing to find her still working on the presentation that she was supposed to be presenting later that afternoon. It seems nothing changes no matter how professional you are. It looks as though they might be working with a crude stop motion format for the next stage in their story.
JEREMY DOWER
Australian based artist, musician and film director, he’s worked as a director in the games industry before moving to more personal work as a multimedia artist. His finished digital work has a really unique feel about it although it originally stems from very confident character drawings, I actually got to see him as he doodled on the glass windows at the beginning of his exhibition. It’s a shame I didn’y get to see him talk.
I have to admit, I left this exhibition somewhat stunned, it’s almost impossible to put into words, in some ways it was my favourite exhibition just due to its sheer freakishness. On entering I exchanged my passport as security for a set of headphones that played a story as I walked around the exhibition. Even with the headphone I still had very little idea what was going on other than there being some kind of dog spirit and a mumified character at the end of the three stages of the exhibition. Then finally in a fourth room a totally unconnected film projected on the wall protraying a crude mixed media spoof game show. Their website features further equally mad mix media animated shorts and adverts.
The Psychedelic Mix:
The Psychedelic Midnight Mix was pretty hit and miss collection of animations, some of which were quite amateurish or might have been OK but simply dragged out the narrative too long seemingly to perhaps fit a required length and in doing so destroying something that could have been quite good or simple. An example of this was 'The Kiú - What Is Out There?' by Andrea Ruschetti. Other's seemed to simply have no narrative at all and were simply pattern based shapes which as techniques were fairly inspiring.
The Lectures & Screenings:
JEREMYVILLE
The one thing that struck me most about this artist is the compact composition of his drawings and the strange perspective that is neither real perspective or isometric, characters can appear to be on the same plane or depth and yet at the same time different depths. I think what perked my ears up the most was the fact that he was from Australia and most of his influence was originally taken from the beach and surf surroundings of Bondi Beach and then almost sadly switched to the sky scrapers and streets of New York due to the practicalities of work.
MARK JENKINS
Although maybe not too much relevance or influential to anything I’d be doing, I did find Mark Jenkins’ story and installations really interesting, basically what he does full time is to mess around fooling people into believing his sculptures are real and casing havoc as a result. For example the image on the left below resulted in the bomb squad being called out and the one on the right earned money throughout the day as a living statue, until the police came to get the sculpture to stand up and move along. It’s almost an artistic version of Trigger Happy TV.
A TOWN CALLED PANIC
- by Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier for La Parti & Pic Pic André
This is just insanely brilliant and complicatedly simple series of animations. The lecture given by these two guys was kind of painstaking to listen to but still very funny and even revealing as to some of the less obvious techniques used to animate pre-molded toy figures in such a way that you just assume wrongly that they’ve simply taken a couple of plastic character out of a toy shop and moved them about a bit using stop motion. Well that almost sums it up. It’s very unique and crude looking and plays up to the fact that the movements of the characters are limited in very open manner that make the whole thing even more entertaining. The narratives are mad and the pace and the odd voices are simply frantic.
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LOGORAMAThis is a short film that was directed by the French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy + Ludovic Houplain. It was presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2009. It opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short.
Building a world and short animation by using logos as the characters, building and objects is perhaps an obvious idea yet I guess no-one has done it in this way, the casting of Ronald McDonald as a villain with a speech impediment is complete genius. Whereas in any other story you would have to sit down create an idea, a narrative, and create characters from scratch, Logorama meant trawling through brand identities and adapting them into the plot. I'm not sure it that would have made things more difficult or easier?
DOOMED
Doomed by Guillermo García Carsí presents the failures of the natural selection. A set of strange creatures whose instincts instead of focusing on survival seem doomed them to an absurd and comic extinction, in the presence of the astonished gaze of the narrator.
Inverted hedgehogs and mooing cube fish are but some of the bizarre character creations.
Unfortunately I can only seem to find this short teaser trailer but the entire animation lasts 11 minutes of doomed useless looking creatures struggling to survive...
BABIOLES
The version of this at the Pictoplasma festival was over 4 and a half minutes long, depicting the useless journey of some kind of naive squeaky rubber toy character seemingly looking for a purpose in life or friendship and certainly initially trying to scape the rubbish tip he's found himself in. What I really like about this is the simplicity, the comedy and the fact that the creator has chosen to place this 3D animated character into the real world. The great thing is although he visually and technically blends in amazingly well, the character itself is completely out of place in the real world. It's great.
Produced by Autour de Minuit, a film by Matray.
BABIOLES_trailer 2 from matray on Vimeo.
BABIOLES_excerpt from matray on Vimeo.
This wasn't at Pictoplasma but it's still funny and part of the series of animations...
Babioles - TRAILER from matray on Vimeo.
HOLY CHICKEN OF LIFE AND MUSIC
I mean, what are we meant to think! Mental but brilliant...
What have I gained from this experience?
What I’ve acknowledged from this trip and from this course so far is that I have never been an illustrator, in fact I have no one definite style of illustrating, part of being a commercial graphic designer seems to have lead me to subdue my artistic identity in order to make something commercially viable, adapting to whatever style is neccesary for each individual brief to please a client and make money. Many of the artists within the Pictoplasma experience are very good at doing one style of something extremely well, which I guess is how you become better than someone else at doing something. There is a personal identification in my 'way of working' that I have perhaps lost by being ‘commercial’ that is kind of re-emerging and which I would like to re-gain, so far this course has re-awoken this and Pictoplasma has filled it with more fuel.
My experience of all types of illustrative styles and formats over the years has perhaps meant that the static illustration/exhibitions although still full of crazy characters and inspiration were less beneficial than hearing and seeing the artists themselves describe their own ways of working in animation and seeing a series of new inovative animations on the big screen. Even the more psychadelic less successful animations featured interesting aspects demonstrating what is possible should I want to apply these techniques to something in the future.
In the short term, what it has re-enforced is my desire to have a go at producing some camera tracking animation, combining 3D characters/objects with real footage. It was well worth the trip it was just a shame I had to leave early so only really got to see just about a day and a half of the talks and films.
What I’ve acknowledged from this trip and from this course so far is that I have never been an illustrator, in fact I have no one definite style of illustrating, part of being a commercial graphic designer seems to have lead me to subdue my artistic identity in order to make something commercially viable, adapting to whatever style is neccesary for each individual brief to please a client and make money. Many of the artists within the Pictoplasma experience are very good at doing one style of something extremely well, which I guess is how you become better than someone else at doing something. There is a personal identification in my 'way of working' that I have perhaps lost by being ‘commercial’ that is kind of re-emerging and which I would like to re-gain, so far this course has re-awoken this and Pictoplasma has filled it with more fuel.
My experience of all types of illustrative styles and formats over the years has perhaps meant that the static illustration/exhibitions although still full of crazy characters and inspiration were less beneficial than hearing and seeing the artists themselves describe their own ways of working in animation and seeing a series of new inovative animations on the big screen. Even the more psychadelic less successful animations featured interesting aspects demonstrating what is possible should I want to apply these techniques to something in the future.
In the short term, what it has re-enforced is my desire to have a go at producing some camera tracking animation, combining 3D characters/objects with real footage. It was well worth the trip it was just a shame I had to leave early so only really got to see just about a day and a half of the talks and films.
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