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

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.

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

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