Lately, I’ve been enjoying a period of well-deserved leisure after a long succession of many jobs. But of course, because this is me we’re talking about, I also glanced at my “not-urgent to-do list”.
Almost a year ago now, before I went to work on Out of Words at Wiredfly, a friend who is debuting as a director, Sašo Dudić, asked me to animate his production-company logo to put in front of his short films. The idea was extremely appealing and the timing was initially good in my head: I could animate a quick little thing on one of the units at Wiredfly on a weekend or at the end of a working day. Ha ha ha! How delusional of me! Of course, I had no time at all either side of a working day at Wiredfly, what with having a dog who also requires 2-hour walks every day and weekends were not any better, having far less overall “work” capacity after 25 years in the industry.
So here we are, a year later, fully rested and enjoying a leisurely period, and deciding almost on a whim to switch the lights on and sculpt my way through the animation of Broken Arm.
I walked into the downshooter unit of the very kind-hearted association/production company Dagiba, in Ljubljana (fronted by the extremely talented animator-director Timon Leder who let me shoot for free), with only a bit of plasticine, 2 bones that I salvaged out of a Halloween toy (good timing!) and pretty much no idea what I was actually going to do with this Broken Arm concept.
The participants of my animation training course have heard me hammer time and again how important it is to prepare one’s shot. Well, I did exactly …the opposite. I had a very faint idea of what I’d like (the dynamic tearing of the skin leaving two bits of bones exposed and falling like broken clock hands at the very end, but no idea how to do the tearing, what the timing should be, or the actual squash & stretch motion, not even whether I’d have shirt sleeves or not. I improvised each frame all the way until about mid-shot where I had a clearer vision til the end. Sometimes you just gotta have fun
And I hadn’t even told Sašo that I was shooting his logo that day, because I wanted no pressure at all to even complete it there and then. I wanted just fun!
Well, this little productive tantrum for sure made someone happy. Some-2 actually, because I had had an absolute blast sculpting through that plasticine animation all day, of course! But he also was over the moon, extremely touched that I did it at all and he loved it! I hope you do too.
There’s nothing like the pure joy of animation when you don’t have deadlines or even a brief 😅🤣