GUM #4

I guess a professional, trained writer could lead a story towards a set subject without too much trouble, but I am not one and I when I 'write', the best I can do is assemble a bunch of things my mind has digested and make it work somehow.
And when writing Gum, I couldn't help but picking up on the fact that koreans have, how shall I put it?... a special realtionship to food. Well, that's a politically correct way of expressing what I really mean, that they're in fact obsessed with their food... First off, restaurants or food stalls everywhere (I mean everywhere...) but more telling than that, food is heavily featured on tv; you can't flick through channels without finding someone enjoying a meal, or competing for one...
In any case, if I can respect this um... passion, I find it hard to understand and relate to. Mostly because I can't for the life of me eat spicy food, but also because even though I do enjoy a good meal once in a while and my wife is a great cook, the way to my heart is definitely not through food.
So, to get back to my original point, all of this must have made its way through to the story of this grandpa who can't help but looking at chewing-gum as a disease-inducing thing that needs to be gotten rid of in favour of 'real food', rice.

GUM #3

I found a whole bunch of drawings I made while I was 'writing' gum, trying to figure out what the grandpa would look like. I can't really remember, but apparently I wasn't really set on a grandfather and I explored the option of having a grandma instead. though now that I think about it, it may be that I was planning for a moment to have a cute old couple instead of just one grandparent. You can imagine why this went out the window real quick.

In any case, I got a whole bunch of  pictures off the internet that I then drew from, trying to get a sense for what I wanted, let it brew for a while and finally came up with a face that I felt both interesting and that I was comfortable with.

The design then evolved a little as I was drawing the storyboard, but not very much. The kid on the other hand, I didn't even bother trying to design and left it for the time I would animate... Because honestly, the kid is not nearly as interesting as the grandpa.

GUM #2 animatic

As storyboards go, this one is pretty detailed and the drawings a lot more finalized than needed. It was the same for 'niledog' and there's a simple reason for that; I am not a story artist at heart and it's usually an exercise I don't really like.
I'm naturally very impatient, (which is weird considering I chose animation as a career) and storyboard feels both too slow and too fast all at once. It's a weird feeling that it should be done faster while I'm doing it, and I feel surprised and frustrated when it's done that I didn't connect with the scene or sequence; it falls right in my patience blind spot.
 So for me the only way to make working on a board enjoyable is to see pretty pictures at the end.
It goes without saying it's a silly way to approach a story work, as it makes every cut or editing choice very painful, but at the time I did this I didn't care much for efficiency; all I wanted was to make something pretty and to keep my 'artistic' sanity in the middle of all that TV work...


 

GUM #1

 GUM is a short film I was planning to animate up until about 2010.
I have done a whole animatic (that I will try to post next week) but somehow I was never really satisfied with it, it never really got any traction and bottom line, (though I only realized later) I have already done a short film and I'm not really fond of the format.
Some people do it really well, the 'anecdote' aspect of a short however doesn't really appeal to me, neither as an artist nor as an audience. I'm naturally drawn to longer stories, with characters develloping etc...

These drawings do not feature anyone that ended up in the film, but they represent the beginning of the journey.
I did those in Australia back in 2006  shortly after I met my then girlfriend, now wife.
I'm not crazy about all things korean, the spicy food especially, but I really like their traditionnal clothing; it just looks... cool.

I started drawing, playing with ideas in my head, but even though I liked where it was going graphically, I never got to anything looking even remotely like a good story and it slowly faded.

Cut to 2009, when I get offered a supervising job in Korea and spend 7 'difficult' months  trying to figure out what I'm doing there... My basic answer when I'm in a tough situation is 'work more', and so I did, and over the course of my stay, I wrote, designed and drew the animatic for GUM.


Now, almost nothing of my original ideas remain, not even my fondness for the clothing, but I still look back on it once in a while and I really like that small story of a grandpa struggling to connect with his grandkid...