Dick Arnall (DA)  The reason I'm here is really incidental. The man here is Run. As someone that helps to run the animate! project, we have twice commissioned Run to make a work for animate! Jukebox was finished in 1994, and the second commission Rabbit was completed last year. At animate! we don't actually produce the commissions as part of our philosophy that what we're about is supporting the artist in their space, not running off an animate! production line which might produce a lot of animate!-style clones. We want the artist to have as much protected space as possible to do their work. In that arm's-length relationship, it's been a real privilege for me and the rest of the animate! team to support Run pursuing Jukebox and more recently Rabbit, in a quite extraordinarily focused and talented way.

We're here now to look at what Run assembled, unpicked and then reassembled in order to make Rabbit. I can tell you from looking at the website stats for www.animateonline.org, that apart perhaps from maybe Toy Story and Wallace and Gromit, Rabbit is now the most blogged-about animation of all time. If I pursue those stats back to where the blogging is, there's so much interest in where this film came from and what it's dealing with, because everyone’s twigged that there's some underlying core to it which has some root in reality.

Some see the John and Jane books there, and they go to the website and discover the educational stickers and they throw that into the blog, and everyone gets a further sense of insight. What we’re hoping to do today is to actually get Run’s background; his real story of where the film came from. The premise was Run coming across some found material, and then devising Rabbit upwards from that material. In fact, going back through Run’s previous work, there’s been a constant strand of using found material. Although this is not a Run Wrake retrospective, we thought it would be interesting to look at some of those examples; to see previous ways that found material has come through into the finished, final form.

We’re going to right back to the very beginning with the first film, Anyway, which was actually your graduation film from the Royal College of Art in 1990. You finished that not long before you put in your proposal to make an animate! film, didn’t you?

Run Wrake (RW)  A couple of years before. The proposal was in 1992.

DA  So how long did it take to make Anyway at the Royal College?

RW  Two years. But it took 18 months to plan it. When I first got to college I already had roughly in my mind what I wanted to do, which was to make a soundtrack from found sound and sampled sound, and then just make a film to it. After a few meetings with Bob Godfrey he let me do it.

DA  Where did this material come from, that you decided to incorporate in with the music?

RW  I used to go down to Portobello Market every week and just look out for anything that took my fancy, really. I always liked old ephemera, magazines, books.

DA  That’s always been a hobby, has it?

RW  Yeah. Since I started at college I began thinking about the issues more seriously.

DA  Perhaps we can have a look at Anyway. Is there anything else we should know about it?

RW  That really was it. The soundtrack came first – it was all sampled off records onto 4 track tape, just using the pause button, and then animating the visuals to it.

[Anyway clip]

DA  Some observations about it – that was your soundtrack; you did all of that soundtrack?

RW  Yeah – well, it’s all other people’s records.

DA  You lifted it, you sampled it and mixed it together?

RW  Yeah.

DA  I think it’s a wicked soundtrack. And I was really interested that you give that much time, that much attention and interest on the soundtrack, and the synching between the images and the soundtrack…

RW  That’s what got me interested in animation initially. There’s a video for the Art of Noise called Close to the Edit which is collage and beats really tightly synched, and there’s something about those two things that got me very excited and got me doing animation. So I was very keen to replicate that idea.

DA  The other aspect I think with relevance to the discussion today, is that there’s a lot of found stuff in there, a lot of retro stuff really. Some of what you’re doing though is making it very contemporary. You’re giving it a contemporary context – perhaps we’ll come back to that.

RW  There’s actually one of the stickers for Rabbit in there. I should have pointed it out. There’s the two architect guys shaking hands, and when they pull apart there’s a flash frame of one of the stickers. I’d forgotten it was in there.

DA
So you must have actually submitted it as a supporting material when you put in your submission to Animate in 1992 for Jukebox. That’s probably the last time I saw it.

RW  Yeah.

DA  So you got a commission to make Jukebox. How do you see Jukebox? It’s a quasi-strange-autobiographical tale of a lad who discovers himself in circumstances that aren’t of his making, and it ends up with this rush through Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move On Up’, and this mind-blowing journey. Perhaps we could have a look at that now.

RW  Yeah. If I can get this to work. Bear with me.

DA  That was all made with gouache paints?

RW  Acrylic. It’s all paint on paper, paint on cel. This actually started out as a narrative – well it was trying to tell a story and it was all tightly storyboarded. But then halfway through I got a bit bored of doing that, so that’s when it goes back to the music.

DA  That’s why you had to have Curtis Mayfield. That must be one of the most-catalogued bits of music of all time, and difficult to get the rights to.

RW  Yeah. Shall we play it?

[Jukebox clip]

DA  There’s a lot of photocopying it.

RW  Yeah, I love photocopying. The other reason for that was, because you’re using found materials so often, you’ve just got a still – you know one really nice image – that you want to use, and the way to make it move is to play around with zooming and framing. Certainly with photocopies at that time, they really messed images up. Nowadays they’re too good; you cut it up but it stays pretty much the same. In those days the more you blew it up the more fucked-up it would get, and you’d end up with this abstract surface.

DA  I would like to make the side observation that apart from the photocopying, that film is totally hand-made. Every single frame is a work of art. So looking back on it now, it’s hard to believe that it predated the digital desktop and it’s totally hand-crafted work.

RW  Two years. Never again.

DA  Blood, sweat, paint and ink.

RW  Indeed.

DA  So where did the photocopying stuff… because those faces are a very strong, powerful element.

RW  There’s a set of books they had when I was in college. In the late 80s and early 90s every college library had a set of these ‘Fairburn Faces’. I don’t know if you’re familiar with these, but if you’re an animator who likes using found materials they’re an absolute boon. They’re designed as illustration reference, so if you’re an illustrator and you need someone who’s looking in a certain direction with a certain expression, within here you’ll find the head. Obviously they’ve got lots of pages with the same head in different positions. It enables you to use found imagery, but actually to animate it. Usually you’ve only got one flat image, and apart from moving it around or zooming in on it, there’s not a lot you can do with it. That’s the joy of these.

DA  Is it copyright-free, then?

RW  As far as I know. We’ve tried to track down who owns it, but it’s a mystery. It went out of print in the late 70s. These are the figures. There’s three sets of three heads – male heads, female heads, and male and female heads. There’s ethnic groups, there’s children – I haven’t got the children so if anyone’s got them and they want to sell, let me know! Then there’s figures going through different actions, just doing various activities and shot from different angles.

DA  It’s a bit like Muybridge in a way.

RW  Definitely. Apart from obviously they just hold that position and the cameraman moves round them. Muybridge is so overused, but when I first started doing animation and didn’t know anything about him, and just for showing how animation works, Muybridge was so influential. So these featured a lot – I still use them constantly today; they’re so useful. In Japan I’ve bought contemporary versions in the manga shops. I’m sure you can get them online.

DA  So you made Jukebox, and it was very much noticed in the wider world. Channel 4 transmitted it, and it went on to have a festival life too. By that time you’d been noticed and you were being approached to make music videos.

RW  Yeah, Jukebox directly led to a long-time collaboration with Howie B, who did the music on Rabbit. He saw Jukebox and was looking for somebody to make a film, and that led to a series of collaborations, and that promo kicked off a lot of other work. Jukebox was such an important piece of work in terms of my career, as well as personally.

DA  We can’t go through all that material today, but what would you like to show us from that period?

RW  This is a bit later, but this is a promo for a guy called Spacer called The Beamer. He’s a knob-twiddler. A very good knob-twiddler, but a knob-twiddler nonetheless. An electronic musician. I wanted to show this because it’s found material, but the material is moving. By this time DV cameras were affordable so I got one of those, and wherever I went I shot bits of footage – not with any idea of where to use it in mind, but just collecting a bit of a library…

DA  Your own stock library, essentially.

RW  Yeah, creating your own found footage. This uses a lot of that. I was on holiday in France, and I got the train from the Pyrenees back to Paris. For the first bit of the journey, it was a tiny little train with 3 or something, so I just filmed out of the back of the train for about an hour or something, and that footage became the beginning of this promo. It was a rare chance, because generally on a train you can’t get up to the front or the back, so you can only film out of the side windows, not down onto the tracks. I thought ‘that may come in useful one day’.

DA  So in a sense, when you actually came to make The Beamer, this was like found footage because it was quite random.

RW  Sort of. I didn’t have the promo in mind when I shot it. When I go to do stuff, I don’t think ‘I need a picture of X – oh there’s a picture of X’. I just find stuff, stick it on a shelf, and one day it does come in useful.

[The Beamer clip]

RW  I should have mentioned what the song was about. Luke had a very old BMW and he had to sell it because of the financial implications of having another baby. Hence the little girl in the car.

DA  I didn’t know about the circumstances of making it, but very often music videos have to be made in about three weeks, from beginning to end.

RW  I think we had about six weeks, and there was a team of three of us.

DA  Unlike short films like Jukebox or Rabbit.

RW  Yeah, it’s a totally different discipline.

DA  You have to start repeating stuff and recycling.

RW  The looping works well: (a) it saves you time, when time is short, and (b) the music is very much looped. So they work very well together – it’s a compromise, but it’s a compromise that almost makes things better.

DA  Looking at that, with the found footage, I wasn’t sure if you’d treated it or not. Some of the flickering going on there in the background footage. Is something going on there with you intervening?

RW  Some of it I’ve fiddled with the contrast – not massively. Generally I’ll whack the contrast up so it’s nice and sharp.

DA  We’ll come to it, but did you use any live action footage in Rabbit?

RW  The skies. I planned to shoot it, but you can’t say ‘right, I need a sunrise now’, so there was lots of jumping out of an edit at 5 in the morning when there was a good sunrise to set the camera up. You had to wait till the sky did what you hoped it would do, and then catch it.

DA  One other thing you suggested that might be interesting to look at is something you made for Channel 4.

RW  Yeah, this is a title sequence for a series of documentaries called The Showbiz Set, which was about the stars of the 70s. The brief was they wanted to end up with something that looked a bit like Sgt. Pepper’s. They gave us some old cleared footage of the artistes in question, and then we had to sift through it and capture bits of their heads and bodies that we could loop up and that would work together. So it was using found footage that was given to us, but it was sifting through that footage to make something that would gel together. All the backgrounds were from old interior design magazines.

DA  Was that your choice – the backgrounds?

RW  Yes. That was my suggestion for what we were doing.

DA  So you were left to research and sift?

RW  Yeah. They basically just provided us with a big pile of tapes and said ‘there you go’.

DA  So what we’re seeing in the background here then now, what we’re about to see, is stuff that you researched and found and incorporated?

RW  Yeah. A friend of a friend who’s an interior designer had some beautiful old journals from the 1950s. I’ve just got a thing about 50s printing. I think the colours you get – almost Technicolor – are so great.

[The Showbiz Set clip]

DA  Thanks for that. I think it’s really interesting to get those glimpses of the value you’ve put on found material in the past, in your previous work. So let’s come now to the reason why we’re here today. Way back in 2003, coming up to animate!'s 2004 submission deadline, you rediscovered something you had come across quite a while ago…

RW  Yeah, the stickers. Back in about 1982 I think, there was a shop in Upfield where I grew up in Sussex - locally it was known as ‘Harrod’s on the Hill’ – that was quite possibly the best second-hand shop known to mankind. It was the most amazing treasure cave. I found this pile of envelopes with these lovely 50s stickers in for 2 quid.

DA  You have a great nose for these kinds of things.

RW  Well I just go and look. Seek and ye shall find, you know? If you go into enough junk shops, sooner or later you’re going to find something.

DA  But I might have gone into that shop 1000 times and never spotted those.

RW  Well, I did know the shop quite well. I knew the little corners where things were likely to be hiding.

DA  What did you see when you actually found them? What was on the top of the pile?

RW  Just the envelopes. [holds up envelopes] Dusty old envelopes, with these logos on top, and inside were these stickers – hundreds and hundreds of them. There were 3 different styles, and the most diverse is this style here.

DA  So they were poster-stamp style tear-out stickers?

RW  Yeah, probably 2 inches square maybe, with about 20 to a sheet. This is a different style – ‘Let’s Go Shopping’ with groceries and fridges and stuff.

DA  They’re actually about teaching reading, are they?

RW  Yeah, I imagine they would come with some sort of book that the teacher would look at. There’d be gaps in it and you’d have to find where the right word went or whatever. I don’t really know. This is the one that kick-started the story – the idol sticker, which I thought was very odd to illustrate the letter ‘i’.

DA  Especially for English school-kids of the 50s.

RW  That was the starting point.

DA  So when you saw those, you must have just jumped on them – they were something you just had to have.

RW  My best junk-shop find, really.

DA  So you took them home, you put them away – what did you do with them?

RW  I would use the odd one here or there – I did a little Super 8 thing with a cut-out bus. They were in a drawer and I would use them now and again, but it was in the back of my mind that one day I should do something with all of them. When that time arrived, things had been very quiet at work, and I knew Animate was coming up. I was moving studios from Soho as well, and I rediscovered them and thought ‘this is the time to do it’. So I started playing around with the pictures in Photoshop, and the first thing I came up with was that [shows image].

DA  Ooh, that’s wicked.

RW  Yeah, it slightly scares me. I don’t know what it’s about. What was going on in my head?

DA  You were just messing around there? You didn’t have a story?

RW  These were the first visuals… now you can start to see the Rabbit thing had started to take shape, but the girl was different. I had the beginnings of a story. I knew that she was going to kill a Rabbit and they were going to find the idol.

DA  You were transfixed by this idol – it really stood out as something noticeably odd.

RW  Yeah, amongst the stickers there were lots of things that children would be aware of, but an idol – how would explain that to a 5 or 6 year old kid?

DA  You were devising a narrative structure around the idol?

RW  The idol stuck out, so he became a character. I wanted to do some morphs, so the idea of the idol being able to transform objects, that’s why I focused on him and he became the conduit for being able to do that morphing.

DA  He had some sort of mystical power.

RW  Yeah, I could give him any powers I wanted. That’s why he’s the star of the show. The rest of the story was really driven by the images. There was a rabbit, and the rabbit and muff sort of linked together because that gave her a reason to kill the rabbit. The images drove the story, because they were a finite resource. There were, I don’t know, 200 pictures and I was looking for connections between them.

DA  Well in principle you did, but unlike the Fairburn images what you had were fixed, flat images. What made you think that you could animate these?

RW  That’s why I worked in After Effects, where you can create a 3D – or 2½D – world which you can people with objects and stuff. I think it probably would have been possible in-camera, but I wouldn’t have wanted to attempt it. That made things a lot easier, and with the characters, the boy and the girl, I had maybe 5 images of each of them in slightly different positions. That lent itself to being able to move them around a bit more freely, and also After Effects has this parenting tool which enables you to separate a body up into left and right hand, left and right forearm, and then link them and move them. It’s like those brass pins that you could stick through cardboard cut-out figures to make them move – that’s the principle. They act as hinges.

But in After Effects if you pair the hand to the forearm and the forearm to the upper arm, if you move the hand then the arm goes with it. So you don’t have to move each part separately – it parents, it links everything together. It makes the style of animation that I’m using here much more feasible.

DA  When you were conceiving this idea of actually visually basing the film on these characters that appear in these stickers, did you see it as being a challenge in animation terms to make them move enough to come alive onscreen?

RW  That was the biggest challenge I would say. I really wanted them to move as realistically as possible. I’ve got a clip that demonstrates the process, so I’ll show that.

[live action clip]

I shot some live action footage with a friend – once the film was storyboarded he came down and acted out each shot, down in Leytonstone. These shots were used as the technical aid to animate over the top of. There was a lot of tweaking, because we were very limited in how many views of the characters we had. So it was trying to find a compromise between the three-dimensional nature of live action with essentially a front view, side view and back view. So I was trying to find a balance between the images I had, and the incredibly complex live action – trying to find somewhere in the middle.

DA  Most people who aren’t animators would probably call it 2D. They’d see it as flat, and not realise that it’s actually 2½D.

RW  Well it’s only 2½D once it’s placed in the environment. The characters were animated as flat things, and then placed within a three-dimensional state.

DA  So to come back to the story, there’s the morph thing – the superpowers that the idol has, the way you identify the boy and the girl, so then… this extraordinary strange and dark story, which is playing with notions of childhood. These characters are very much idealistic. There’s a romantic sense of innocence, so how far did you want to expose the dark underbelly? How much did you want to play with this notion of darkness?

RW  I don’t know how much of that at the time was calculated. I would argue that the main reason that the children were the characters was that I had 5 pictures of the boy and the girl, and I only had one each of the mother and father. So just from an animation point of view, it was easier to animate the kids. Obviously I like a bit of a dark view, so it lent itself to that. But whether it was that or the fact it was going to make the animation easier, I don’t know.

DA  You assembled this story, and you put in a storyboard as part of your support material for this – which is actually on the website, every page of it. If you go back and look at it, and think of the scenario was pinned down, and the plot and images were devised before you even started making it, before you got the commission. I’ve never seen a film follow a storyboard so closely in recent times.

RW  I’d never really done a storyboard like that before. It was interesting for me too.

DA  Because you’d never really told a story before?

RW  Maybe, yeah. That was the most exciting thing for me on Rabbit – it was a conscious decision to try to tell a story.

DA  Because previously your films had been fragmentary, prismatic, looped.

RW  Music-based. Very much driven by the music. I still love that side of it, but I think if you can tell a story it opens up huge areas of possibility.

DA  Was it also slightly scary, setting out to devise a completely different timeline; the washing-line of a plot?

RW  That’s why I’ve always avoided narrative, because I thought it was constraining and it would hold me back, but in fact it was the opposite and I really enjoyed that discipline. This shot has to say this and lead to that.

DA  So this was your first-ever story film?

RW  With Jukebox I didn’t intend to tell a story, but it didn’t really work out like that. But not a story that people could really remember and hold on to.

DA  It could almost be a children’s storybook. That’s part of the fascination of the game that you’re playing with the ‘John and Jane’ era of images, and romantic idea of childhood. So you put in this proposal to animate!. We knew your work. This was always the idea with animate!, that we assess upfront, and it looked fascinating and vaguely wicked in some way. There was an underlying concern that of course you’d been inspired by and were planning to incorporate stickers that you’d found – and those stickers belonged to someone.

So one of the nerdy aspects to using found material is that if they’re less than 50 years old, or sometimes 70 years old depending on copyright law, someone still actually owns those things and has rights in them. So I think one of the first things we said to you, when we said that we really wanted to commission this because we liked the idea and where you wanted to take us with the film, was that you had to clarify what the rights situation was with the stickers. They were actually dated 1955.

RW  One of the stickers, I think it was ‘ink blot’, the blot was on a letter and the letter was dated 1955. So we thought the stickers must be from 1955, or maybe a year or two either side.

DA  Then you went off and googled, and you discovered the company that printed them - whose name was on the envelope - still existed.

RW  Philip Tacy, yeah. On the envelopes it said ‘Fulham’, but they’re now down in Devon and still producing educational materials. A family-run company. I tell you, get their catalogue because it’s fantastically interesting stuff, at bargain basement prices. Philip Tacy – check them out.

So I contacted a guy called Ian Horsfield, who I was speaking to. He did some research and tried to find out who the artist was, but it remains inconclusive. Geoffrey Hines was their best guess, but Ian didn’t really know how to deal with it. They’d never had to think about this kind of thing before.

DA  One thing they would have known was that back in those days, when illustrators were hired to illustrate story-books or educational stickers, it was certainly the case that the copyright in the work would have passed from the artist to the production company. So they were pretty confident that they did own the copyright, and therefore could give Run a licence to incorporate the stickers into the film, which they did for a very reasonable sum.

RW  Very reasonable. It was quite late in the production process before that was all sorted out, so they could have turned round and said ‘no’. So hats off to Philip Tacy – please shop with them.
Do you want to see the test shots, because these actually came before the story-board, before the full story-board. I didn’t actually send these to animate!, because I thought it was a bit too finished.

DA  Yes, we might have got the wrong idea and thought you’d actually already made the film.

RW  I’m sure somebody said somewhere down the line that you shouldn’t make your submission look too finished, so I held back on it. This was the original music too, which was just to give an idea of the vibe of the piece.

[Rabbit test shots]

DA  That’s fascinating, because you’re playing round with different ideas of collage there.

RW  I thought I was going to have flat colours for backgrounds, and leave the paper round the trees, leave the shape of the stickers round it, but it started to get immensely complicated with all the layers.

DA  It was quite self-conscious and theatrical.

RW  I wanted to make it more collage-y.

DA  One aspect which everybody notices when they watch the film, but maybe isn’t aware why it’s there because they haven’t seen the source material, is the words. The rabbit is tracked by the word ‘rabbit’, and the knife and the muff and everything else. What inspired you to include those words?

RW  I don’t know really. They were there on the stickers. I did graphics initially at college and I like words and pictures together. I just thought they looked kind of interesting. Nice font. There was no great idea behind it - I just thought it looked nice.

DA  I don’t know whether anyone here is familiar with the high-end, blue-sky, new media thinking around ubiquitous computing - this notion that we’re sliding away from the fixed physical desktop machine towards a world where everything’s going to be computerised. Oyster cards are the start, and tagging barcodes in shops will be radio-identifiable: RFID tagging so that not only will your purchases be racked up automatically on the till before you leave, but actually we can be tracked by wearing our T-shirt for the rest of its life. In order to get this to work, everything in the world has to be uniquely tagged so that it can be tracked. The way we think about this, and the enormous implications of it, introduce this ‘sliding’ into the world we live in. The people that are working on this, one of their biggest tasks is how to devise a universal identifier for everything that we handle. In a totally random sort of way, I notice again from the interest in Run’s film, that this film has sort of been adopted by these people, in an ironic joking way, because it makes big play of this. Everything that appears on-screen has a name that follows it, and they’re very amused; they’re tickled by it.

Anyway, I think it’s time now to play Rabbit the film.

[Rabbit clip]

DA  I must say that’s the most adroit bit of story-telling, having planned beforehand exactly where you want us to be looking in every scene. Marvellous.

RW  Not every scene – I mean, there’s a little bit of leeway for looking in different places.

DA  When you were putting down the story, were you ever tempted to cheat a bit and devise characters that you didn’t have in the stickers?

RW  No, not at all. What I really wanted was to keep the cohesion of that style of illustration. There were quite a few things in there that weren’t actually from the stickers. For example, the insides of the animals were from an old veterinary manual, and there was a shortage of furniture in the stickers, so I had to try and solve that. They came from various books and magazines.

DA  But that was background. Were you actually consciously trying to get something from the same era, the same style?

RW  Yeah. For me it was very important to keep that look on every element with the film, apart from the morphs obviously, which were more magical – and that kind of worked because they were different.

DA  But in terms of the lead players, the main characters, you weren’t tempted to…

RW  I did think about tracking them down, but that’s the thing with found material. If you suddenly decide you want a piece of found material, it’s so hard to find. You have to find it first and then find the application for it, rather than thinking ‘Right, I need such-and-such an image from such-and-such an era in such-and-such a style’. To actually go and try to find it can be infuriating and virtually impossible.

DA  Do you think the fact that you were limited to a handful of lead performers actually ended up making the story stronger?

RW  In some ways it made the animation easier, because I did have a finite source of material to use. Sometimes if you’ve got too much stuff to choose from it becomes very difficult to choose. When that choice is taken away then you’ve just got to work with what you’ve got.

DA  I also enjoy the soundtrack very much. I notice that you have a credit for sound design and the rest of it. Your previous stuff was either supplied as a music video, or it was something like Jukebox where you invented a lot of the sound yourself. So what happened with the sound on Rabbit?

RW  Well, it was another first for this because the sound came afterwards. I think on Jukebox we did some of the sound effects later, but the music did come first. I’ve always had the sound to work with first, and then broken that sound down to animate to it.

DA  Traditionally with animation it’s the soundtrack downwards.

RW  Yeah, but with this I wanted to move away from the music thing, so I knew I wanted the soundtrack to be mainly foley effects and atmosphere. I don’t have the skills necessary to do that.

DA  Foley effects being sound effects created in a sound recording studio to picture, by people who specialise in simulating real world sound effects, whether they be footsteps or body noises and the like.

RW  I played round a little bit with sound effects I’ve got on CD. You can do birdsong and buzzing flies and things like that. The real beauty of that are the layers of sound that Craig did.

DA  Also the music in here is very muted. It’s almost ambient.

RW  I wrote to him and said I wanted something that was very much going to be in the background, and the opening chords are from a piece of Mozart funeral music. When I came to animate! originally I think I had this sample called ‘Cherry Stones’ by a guy called Eugene McDaniels, which was absolutely beautiful. But by the time I was ready to start really thinking about the sound, there was just no time to look into copyright. So I took that to Howie and that snatch of Mozart, and within minutes he’d turned this single chord into the opening theme. It was one of those [clicks fingers] moments. Like that – bingo. And I think he got it absolutely right. It’s very much background but it’s quite powerful as well.

DA  Also there’s a very important motif in the reprise at the end with the rabbit. Well, I think it’s time for you guys who have questions to fire away.

Audience member  Run, could you give us a very short explanation of this film? As far as you’re concerned, what do those characters represent to you?

RW  Just fallible human beings – male and female. Just people.

Audience member  But you’ve got different characters – children, animals.

RW  Well obviously apart from the idol – you don’t see many of those around – it’s based in a recognisable reality.

DA  But how come the two kids are living alone in the house?

RW  As I said, because it makes it slightly strange and also because I had more pictures of them.

Audience member  So what are your main themes? Because there are actually similarities between this film and your other films.

RW  That’s a good point actually, and watching Anyway was quite interesting there. It’s about greed really, and exploiting nature. I think most of my films touch on that. I think we treat the planet very badly basically, and sooner or later it’s going to get us.

Audience member  What I thought was interesting is the way you treat the bodies of the characters in your previous films; they transform all the time, whereas here they’re stuck. The bodies of these two kids are fixed. There’s only one source of transformation – the magic from the idol - and that brings a bit of fluidity into the world.

RW  The only drawn animation is the morphs. For me that is the great strength of drawn animation – you can go anywhere with it; anything can turn into anything else. As I say, I specifically wanted to stay within this world, and set the whole film in this world, so that’s why they stay as they are.

Audience member  Can you give us any tips about your ethos, or about how you work? How many frames a minute?

RW  It depends on how much is being told in the story. Sometimes in a minute there’s not actually that much information being given out, but in other bits there are key points that you need to get across. I don’t actually think there are any hard and fast rules to it. As a general rule, less is more. Not too many frames if you can avoid it. Generally you just do it and show it to a few people; see if they understand it, if they get what’s going on. That’s probably the best way.

Audience member  I was wondering if you were aware that the RSPCA had received complaints about Rabbit?  My friend’s a manager of the RSPCA, and she said ‘Have you heard of this film called Rabbit?’ and I said ‘Yeah, it’s wicked’, and she said ‘We’ve been receiving complaints about it’.

RW  They do realise they’re not real animals, don’t they? That’s so funny.

Audience member  What got you into using After Effects? And I noticed you don’t use the words for every single object in the film.

RW  I resisted for a long, long time. I didn’t want to get involved with computers but then Photoshop got me started, and it was mainly because of space and also spraymount. I used to use so much spraymount in the studio, and it’s not healthy at all. Photoshop was a way to get virtually the identical result. You don’t get the tactile art thing, but it meant I couldn’t use any spraymount. Once I got into Photoshop and realised how much fun you can have with it, then After Effects was the next logical step. I was working in a studio with somebody who was already doing it and he showed me the ropes, and then it just made so much sense. It meant that I could make a film like Rabbit at home in one room, without having to hire out cameras and all that. For me it’s just a brilliant tool. All the drawn elements are still drawn on paper; they’re just scanned in to a computer. But the way they’re made is exactly the same, so the movement is exactly the same. I don’t think you’re compromising anything – all you’re doing is giving yourself more options and more scope.

DA  A bigger tool set.

RW  And the words? If every little wingless fly had a ‘fly’ tag it would just get too busy, so sometimes I left it out. And the boy and the girl, lots of people asked me why they weren’t tagged. With the sticker for the boy, the tag was ‘jump’ which wouldn’t have made any sense. There isn’t actually a sticker with ‘boy’. Because they were the central characters I figured it wasn’t really that important. There was no real conscious decision about things like that, and sometimes I had images that didn’t have words, so they were just left off.

Audience member  I think this film touches a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. We had the ‘Found’ panel and it seems that you have a very vigorous loyalty or respect for the source materials that you’ve used. I think part of the beauty of this film, at least for myself, is that these stickers have an intention, yeah? We know what kids do – I’m not going to tell you what I did with my dolls, and I’m sure everyone has a story here about pulling the legs off insects or whatever. The beauty of this film is that it’s honest. It’s really what kids do, in a way, and watching it as an adult makes you feel like it was OK.

RW  They don’t realise what they’re doing. When he’s cutting the horse in half he doesn’t think ‘Oh, this is terrible’, it’s just ‘I need to attract flies and if I cut a horse in half I’ll get more flies’. There’s no kind of logic or ethics.

Audience member  Where do you go from here? Are you tempted to do something completely different?

RW  Very good question, because that’s what I’m trying to work out at the moment: what to do next. I want to do drawn characters, but with backgrounds created in a similar way from found materials. I’m scouring places to find the source material for environments. Hopefully it will be similar, but I don’t want to use the same images again. That’s a standalone piece with those stickers.

DA  A short film or a feature film?

RW  Who knows? I don’t know at this stage. Jukebox was the first appearance of Meathead. He’s appeared in various things that I’ve done over the years, so he’s the central character I’m working on.

DA  That’s the pork chop.

RW  Yeah. So I’ve got the central character and I’m working on the background environments using old French hunting magazines.

DA  Have you been approached by production companies?

RW  I’ve had a few interesting calls from people from various places, but whether they’ll lead to anything or not… we’ll see.

Audience member  Do you hunt for the copyright holders for absolutely everything? Because it’s just an utter pain in the arse. Is there any way forward for that? You’re not necessarily trying to make vast amounts of money, you’re just trying to make a point.

RW  It’s difficult. I know exactly where you’re coming from and I’m completely with you, but recently Rabbit has appeared on websites in its entirety, in pretty good quality, without my permission and that pisses me off. So suddenly I’m on the other side of the coin, but at the same time from someone who’s sampled music… for me, I’ve always had more trouble with music and sound because when I’m choosing images I’m always very careful to avoid anything recognisable. Go for old stuff, throwaway stuff and I think generally you’ll be all right. You have to choose your images carefully, and it depends where it’s going to end up. If it’s not going to end up being screened worldwide and as you say making vast amounts of money, then generally you’ll be all right.

DA  Not making vast amounts of money is not ultimately a defence, but it can be a reassurance.

RW  From the people who are going to complain, generally it is I think.

DA  There’s no way that Run could have completed Jukebox with half of the film based on Curtis Mayfield, if he had not actually gone through the motions on that.

RW  It’s always worth approaching people.

DA  We were able to devise a very simple but very reassuring arrangement with Curtis Mayfield’s company – what I call a backstop arrangement – whereby if the film went ballistic and got shown every night on MTV, he’d have got half the income. But was that ever going to happen? No, but nonetheless it was on offer, and because we acknowledged that, you actually got the rights from him for 10 quid, is that right?

RW  25.

DA  So it’s always worth having a go.

RW  I had to go to EMI, to the copyright department, and if they see that what you’re saying you’re doing you are actually doing, then I think they’ll be quite accommodating.

DA  But to come back to the premise of this discussion today and the examination of Rabbit; the whole film was based upon a set of stickers which appeared to be the work of one particular illustrator, and you felt some sort of sense of respect. There was also a Channel 4 dimension that it had to be totally visible.

RW  When the whole film is filled with somebody else’s work I think you have to, yeah.

DA  Have you been haunted by the idea that one of his family is going to come across the film and say ‘There’s Daddy’s drawings!’

Audience member  But sometimes then they’d have the benefit. Maybe not with this, but other things like for example if your film is all over the internet, you may not be getting paid for it immediately but your name is getting around.

RW  Absolutely. That’s the payoff, because I’m getting publicity and there’s a link to my website. In that sense it’s very good – all they need to do is ask. It’s as simple as that. Don’t just stick it up there without asking.

Audience member  I watched one of your commercials – the Coca Cola one – and I just wanted to know, did you make that before Rabbit and if you did, do you feel that now if companies approach you you’re framed into making things in this certain style? If you are, how do you deal with it?

RW  Yeah, that’s true. They do judge you on what you’ve done before, and I think I am seen as very much the collage person at the moment. Whether or not you go with it depends on what the product is, how much they’re going to pay you. Money talks sadly, and you can compromise yourself if the money’s right. Then it frees you up, it buys you time to concentrate on your own work. Coca Cola was done about five years ago; a long time before Rabbit.

DA  I’d just like to thank you, Run, for your time and your insight, and thank you again Adam and the festival crew for hosting events such as this. I think what’s been happening here in Norwich is the most important thing going for British animation at the moment, and we’re incredibly appreciative.

[applause]

Transcribed by Anna Lee
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