Run Wrake's Guide to Animation | movie | 2007 | Official Clip
Run Wrake is an English filmmaker, animation director, and music video director. He studied graphic design at Chelsea Co | dG1fZThpQjQ2X1FVVnM
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 "Thor!"
00:02 "Three, two, one!"
00:05 [Music]
00:30 My name is John Rumbake, I'm an animation director and I've been for the last 17 years.
00:37 Well I started animating when I was studying graphic design at Chelsea School of Art in London
00:42 and got into it really because I was listening to a lot of music and it was a way of incorporating music
00:48 into the sort of illustration work I was doing.
00:51 Subsequently went to the Royal College and did an MA in animation
00:56 and obviously learnt a lot more about the disciplines in making films.
01:00 My graduation film from the Royal College was a film called 'Anyway'.
01:03 So generally I would always start with the soundtrack.
01:06 So the soundtrack was made on an old Teac 4-track mixed live with a pause button and a record player.
01:13 So very scratchy. So I recorded that, it was two and a half minutes long or whatever.
01:18 And then somebody demonstrated how to use a pick sync machine.
01:21 On this one you have a little handle and you have to wind the film with the sound on it through
01:25 and count the number of frames and you wrote on a dope sheet exactly where beats or certain pieces of music would appear.
01:33 And then the film was just made on a punched A4 paper
01:38 and literally I just sort of went off on a stream of consciousness.
01:49 'Rabbit' that came about years ago. I bought a load of 1950s stickers, educational stickers from a junk shop
01:57 and they sat in the bottom of a drawer.
01:59 It's a beautiful, beautiful collection of hundreds of A's for apple, B's for ball.
02:04 And I knew that one day I'd do something with them.
02:06 And that day came during a quiet period with commercial work.
02:12 And the process really was I just laid out all of the images, scanned them all into Photoshop
02:17 so I had seven or eight files with literally every picture.
02:20 And then just started looking through them, looking for connections and looking for a story
02:25 which eventually was generated by the 'idle' sticker,
02:29 which I thought was rather an odd choice to illustrate the letter 'I'.
02:33 And then the idea, I wanted to include some morphs.
02:36 One of the nicest things about animation I think is the way you can morph things from one thing to another.
02:42 So I wanted to include that.
02:43 And then the idea that he could transform objects.
02:46 And I knew I wanted to do something about greed,
02:49 so that came the idea of insects turning into jewels.
02:53 And then the rest of the story snowballed from there.
02:56 But other things like promos, obviously you start with the music
02:59 and sometimes just listening to a rhythm can spark an idea.
03:04 I mean it really does, it varies from project to project.
03:08 [Music]
03:11 The first thing I did with Howie B, and it was just one of those, it was a job, you know,
03:20 there was a budget and it was just a joy.
03:23 It was a real, we subsequently did five videos together but this was the first one.
03:27 And it was a real meeting of minds, the way that he made music was using a lot of loops
03:32 and the way that I was making animation was using loops.
03:36 And we both had completely the same attitude towards the creative process.
03:41 [Music]
03:44 There's so many more channels now on TV for a start and the internet,
03:50 so I think the demand for animation is much bigger than when I left college, certainly.
03:57 And I think it's also got more respect as well, I mean it's seen less as a children's thing.
04:05 When I left college it was all you see was children's series and adverts for breakfast cereal and stuff.
04:13 But now it's broadened, the whole short film thing with YouTube and 1.0 and Future Shorts,
04:22 all these little festivals that are set up specifically both online and in cinemas for short films
04:27 has really opened things up.
04:29 Computers, you know, if you've got a Mac now and After Effects or whatever software you prefer,
04:34 you can make a film in your room.
04:36 When I left college you had to produce artwork, then find a Rostrum camera,
04:41 then shoot it onto film, then find a steam deck to cut it,
04:45 and then tele-cine if you wanted to go on video.
04:47 So the whole thing has become much easier to produce on an individual level,
04:51 which is only a good thing when you're starting out.
04:54 [BLANK_AUDIO]