Ok ok - so here’s a little interview that was taped by apengine -
I’m blethering away merrily there - apologies!

http://www.apengine.org/2009/09/laurie-hill/

Director:
Laurie Hill

There’s a fun little Q&A I was asked to complete up on the British Council website.

Here’s the link:
http://www.britfilms.com/spotlight/lauriehill/

Director:
Laurie Hill

images courtesy of Getty Images

Film title:
Photograph Of Jesus

Running time:
6 mins 40 secs

Description:
Looking for photographs of Jesus, yetis and Hitler in 1948?
Help is at hand with this documentary-fantasy based on true stories of requests for impossible images.
Real-life archives become the stage where fact and fiction collide, belief runs amok and unruly images have a life of their own.

Aspect ratio:
16:9

Language of dialogue:
English

Director:
Laurie Hill

Film title:
La La Song

Band:
The Kissaway Trail

Track title:
La La Song

Record Label:
Bella Union

Running time:
3 mins 5 secs

Description:
Beneath an innocent exterior, this promo for The Kissaway Trail reveals a darker, maggot-ridden heart. Made on a tiny budget, Laurie Hill directs, animates and stars as the cutout runaway in a tale of near-misses, frustration, escape and its repercussions. A stray rocket out of the blue brings disaster, the heavens offer encouragement from afar and a deluge of cockroaches, maggots, dinosaurs and butterflies makes satisfaction an elusive goal. A digital/stop frame collision with plenty of blu-tack.

Extra info:
The idea was to create a surface-level innocent story of escape but then reveal a darker flip side and its repercussions.

Pure cgi can get a bit sterile - and I was really trying to avoid that. I wanted to try a hybrid approach combining computer animation with traditional stop-motion techniques.

I created my main puppet using cutout photographs and wire ? I?m sure you can still see some of the blue tack and glue if you look closely enough! But it?s those hand-made touches and glitches that give it vitality and character. I stop-frame animated this and the other found objects against a bluescreen, shooting with a digital stills camera. These were then placed within computer-generated 3d environments made with elements by illustrator Tekura Maeva.

Aspect ratio:
16:9

Director:
Laurie Hill

Film title:
My First Taste of Death

Running time:
9 mins 30 secs

Description:
Another special collaboration crossing the barriers of time.

A kind of angsty and tormented take on Hollywood actioner full of surreal detail and humour. Me and the boss discover Dodo island, I face a deadly struggle with my nemesis the demented sea scorpion and the whole adventure can only end in tears.

Miniaturised King Kong but without the ape?

Extra information:
As with ‘My Life At 40?, the script is a genuine document written when I was 12 and left unedited.

BAFTA award-winner Ian W. Gouldstone provides the voiceover.

About the music: ?I wanted a powerful original score to be a key feature of my film and was keen to have a close collaboration with the composer, Andrew Lomatschinsky, from a very early stage in the development of the film. Visual and musical ideas were to develop together and proceed through close dialogue right through to the final dubbing session. Jacquelyn McKay provided the soprano vocal performance.?

Andrew Lomatschinsky comments on the score: ?All the music is original and written for this film. As a point of interest, the text used for the soprano is formed from extracts of writings from Hildegard von Bingen (c.1175 AD).?

Aspect ratio:
16:9

Language of dialogue:
English

Director:
Laurie Hill

Film title:
My Life At 40

Running time:
7 mins 40 secs

Description:
I’m not 40 yet but I’m forward-thinking. A special collaboration between the director, aged 12 years, and his 34 year old self, both looking forward to a glorious future as a 40 year old conservation hero and Lamborghini owner. Made with six years to go!

Note on technique:
This film uses a variety of techniques: real and computer animated cutouts, drawing, photography and time lapse. No moving image cameras were used - just digital stills cameras.

Extra info:
?My Life At 40? is billed as a collaboration between versions of myself at different ages struggling to articulate and realise their dreams. In doing so, a negotiation between idealism and pragmatism occurs. The script is a genuine document written when I was 12, rediscovered many years later.

Directly after completing ?My Life At 40?, I worked on a project for BAFTA-nominated director Osbert Parker? a promo film for the World Wildlife Fund, ?WWF Living Planet?, featuring lots of great cutout animation.
?My Life At 40? describes my desire to become a conservation hero by the age of 40 and so this felt like it was a step in the right direction!

Generally speaking, the drama of Control Vs. Unruly Forces is usually bubbling away at the heart of my work and this can fly off in any number of directions. There is also a tension between the desire to create narrative and another to dissolve it. A healthy dose of (dark) humour and a sense of absurdity are also crucial ingredients in the mix. If I can make myself laugh I know I?m on the right track!

Aspect ratio:
16:9

Language of dialogue:
English

Weather Report is a collage of footage home recorded over an entire year on one UK channel ? weather reports. The supposedly banal is transformed into cultural gold!

Director:
Laurie Hill

Project title:
Weather Report

Individual work titles:
1. Weather Report
2. Chrissie, Sian, Martyn, Robin, and Becky
3. Chrissie
4. Sian
5. Martyn
6. Robin
7. Becky

Running time:
approx. 45 secs each
all together 6 mins

Description:
Composites formed from instances of appropriated TV footage: national and London weather reports recorded over an entire year 2004-2005 on one UK channel.
These home-recorded reports have been cropped to a single video ‘line’ each and spliced together to form new hybrids.
Together the hundreds of linear fragments play back simultaneously, as do the vocal commentaries.

Chrissie, Sian, Martyn, Robin, and Becky is an amalgam of multiple presenters, charting the frequency of their appearances.

Aspect ratio:
4:3

Language of dialogue:
English

Director:
Laurie Hill

Another nice piece of Jerwood news here:

My Life At 40 is one of the eight finalist works up for the Jerwood Moving Image Awards 2008.

There’s a complete streaming version now available online at
www.jerwoodmovingimage.com

There’s also an exhibition of the eight finalist works on at the Jerwood Space in London at the moment, details below

Jerwood Space: 20 February - 20 March 2008

Jerwood Space
171 Union Street
London
SE1 0LN

Jerwood Space opening times:
Monday - Friday : 10.00 - 17.00
Saturday - Sunday : 10.00 ? 15.00
Entry: Free

Hello. Due to popular demand in my imagination, here is another extract from ‘The Adventures of John and John’.
This time it is the Exciting Police Drama out of John’s Brain…
2.2MB of Exciting Police Drama

for wills personal site see
www.wrongboy.com

Wrongboy.com

click here for quicktime of an excerpt of ‘The Adventures of John and John

The Adventures of John and John is the graduation film of Will Bishop Stephens
Dur. 7mins 11sec
2006.
www.wrongboy.com

There it is. An excerpt at last. I don’t think festivals mind excerpts.
bon.

for wills personal site see
www.wrongboy.com

Wrongboy.com

For some reason items of news keep on dropping off the bottom of these pages so I’m going to try to bring them back somehow!

April / May 2006

East End Film Festival, London, UK

13th Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film, Germany

February 2006

Finalist & awarded Runner Up in Experimental Animation - Animex Student Animation Awards, Middlesbrough, UK

January 2006

Eat Our Shorts, National Film Theatre, London, UK

Halloween Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts / Curzon Soho, London, UK

Canaries 1Mb 3Mb
Catflap 1Mb 3Mb

Here are two films that Meg and I made for MTV this summer. They were begun in June in a cloud of infectious naïveté, and finished in August on a tube train between Embankment and Westminster.

Will kindly came on board for Canaries, delivering his début acting role. I do not exaggerate when I say that it is his most moving performance to date. We shot ninety percent of the film in one continuous, relentless 20-hour camera marathon, stole a few hours sleep, and then canned the remaining shots in another 4 hours.

The technique required holding one’s pose for hours on end while your stick-on facial features were roughly tampered with by a colleague. After some practice we developed such expertise at this task that it was possible to grab forty winks between frames without moving a muscle. Covent Garden beckons.

Copy 3Mb 8Mb

Winner of several international awards, including Least Continuity and Most Visible Passers By, Copy premiered at the RCA ArtBar in Summer 2005. Based on an original concept by Julie Aveline (Nominated: Worst Walk Cycle in a European Picture) and directed by Ian Mackinnon (Winner: Least Artistic Integrity 2002, 2004), it was commissioned to accompany the launch of a magazine by RCA History of Design students.

Credits:
Direction/Animation: Ian Mackinnon
Concept/Animation: Julie Aveline
Cameraman: Martin
Assistance: Sarah & Miguel

5.21Mb
Hello everyone. Here is Middle dog gets angry. It’s very small but you can just about see.

Michel 0.7Mb 2Mb, Thao 0.7Mb 2Mb, Emma 0.7Mb 2Mb

A series of time-lapse animations based on interviews with children about their identities. The animator and animation process are exposed to the camera along with each pixilated protagonist, a mark of the film-maker’s interpretation of the interviewees’ personalities, and a stamp of his own identity upon the films.

All films were made in one take and took between two and four hours each.

Art 0.7Mb 2Mb

This is my favourite animation of all the films I’ve worked on. As part of a technical project involving lip-synch, André Ruivo and I made this experimental piece of time-lapse character animation that went on to inspire most of my animation work for the next six months.

The two protagonists discuss how difficult it is being an artist while André and I buzz around them, furiously animating their faces. It took four hours of continuous drawing and erasing to make the film and we were awarded a fine collection of blisters each for our troubles.

A Drawing of a Person 0.2Mb 0.3Mb

(this is not an image from the film, but it is near enough)

for wills personal site see
www.wrongboy.com

Wrongboy.com

Bee Control in City Parks 7.9Mb

A Municipal information film (about bee’s controlling city parks)

for wills personal site see
www.wrongboy.com

Wrongboy.com

Klak 3Mb 8Mb

Before starting the animation MA at the Royal College of Art, I had a few final spasms of computer animation to shake out of my system; klak was one of them. It was made in four weeks, little by little each night between gettting home from work and falling asleep at the keyboard. I’d like to believe that it would very different and much better if I’d done it in the daytime, but I can’t be entirely sure.

The protagonist’s body is a 3D CGI rig, but his head is a complex system of 2D lines that deform based on the position of the camera and several user controls to give the illusion of a solid object.

Running time: 01:56

Pooky the Giant Shrew 3.6 MB 7.9 Mb

for wills personal site see
www.wrongboy.com

Wrongboy.com

Un Amour Mobile 3.5Mb 8.5Mb

This is my Batchelor’s Degree graduation film, produced at the National Center for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University.

It was intended as a platform to explore and combine some of the conventions of 2D and 3D animation. It attempts to challenge the audience to question the tangibility of the characters and their environment. Each element is designed to appear at once three dimensional and flat. It is also an experiment in using abstract spaces to facilitate elements of a narrative.

The look of the film was intended to emulate a style of 1920’s french illustration that used cut-out coloured paper and bold, thick brush stroke edges.

Credits:
Animation, Software and Music: Ian Mackinnon
Handwriting: Kristin Ross

Charons Delivery 3.6Mb 9Mb

This film was an excercise in blending hand-drawn cel animation with stylised vector-rendered CGI. Alex Kanaris Sotiriou provided the hand-drawn elements and I wrote a bespoke computer program to render the scribbly CGI. Character animation, cinematography and editing were shared between us and the music was provided by Supra.

Running time: 02:34

Credits:
Animation: Alex Kanaris-Sotiriou & Ian Mackinnon
Rendering software: Ian Mackinnon
Music: Supra