#GE11 Guest Post: Some notes on producing animated Cutbacks!
This is a guest post by DT Finn, who’s doing some brilliant stopmotion satire on his YouTube channel. I asked him to explain a little about the process of making the clips.
I started Cutbacks almost two years ago, furious at what was happening with Lisbon and with Mister Cowen’s government. The stopmotion characters are relatively low-tech, constructed from electrical wire, latex, insulating foam, masking tape, felt and offcut material. The voice is recorded, edited and broken down into frames. The characters are animated against greenscreen, then composited onto photo or video backgrounds. The animation is shot in full HD, though it’s outputted much smaller for internet distribution.
The internet interest has started to build a lot over the past few months, especially since kicking Mister Cowen suddenly became fashionable… A short film Mister Heaney, A Wee Portrait, based on the internet characters, won Best Animation at the 2010 Galway Film Fleadh. The comments, subscriptions and obvious enthusiasm of the audience are all helping to feed and develop the Cutbacks project IP. The problem of ‘monetising’ the Intellectual Property is more complicated. With Barley Films, I’m trying to push different versions of the project towards TV, approaching the Irish Film Board, RTE, TV3 and DCTV. It’s difficult to convince decision makers that the animation material can be turned around fast enough to remain politically relevant. Thanks for all the interest in ‘cutbacks’ and thanks to Allan for pushing it over the past few weeks!
Btw, for even more disgraceful stopmotion, check out rinkydink at… www.youtube.com/user/rinkyTV
.
