Simon Sellars: Sleepy Brain Archives

Interview by Meredith Badger

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The central character in Jonathan Nix’s student animation Hello is a guy with an ancient tape deck for a head. This is a distinct disadvantage when he attempts to chat up the chick with the CD-player head who lives in the flat across the hall. When Nix undertook the Post Graduate diploma in animation at RMIT (AIM) in 2002, he felt a little like this character – a mature-aged student thrown into the technological deep end, where everyone else around him seemed to know how to swim already. But he kept pressing buttons and the guy with the tape-deck head got the girl in the end.

Meredith Badger spoke to Nix about the influences on his work, how he found the transition from printmaker to animation and what he thinks the prospects are like for a new animator.
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How did you end up being an animator?

I’ve always been interested in animation and I’ve always loved it. I saw a film when I was a kid called Fantastic Planet and was quite affected by it. I was generally just really interested in animation as a kid. Then I went to art school and did a visual arts degree and studied to be a print maker, but all through that time I played music as well. So I thought animation would be a good amalgamation of what I liked to do: visuals and sound.

Was there a particular reason why you chose the AIM course?

I actually don’t remember. I think I just found it trawling on the net. I knew I wanted to study animation…or something. At that point I hadn’t narrowed it down. I thought some kind of New Media might be good. I stumbled across the AIM website and I liked the look of it, the philosophy and the examples they showed. I’d been overseas and I had three days to get my selection test in and I did it in this incredible manic rush.

What other animations did you watch when you were growing up?

There was one called Allegro Non Troppo, the Italian version of Fantasia, and it’s fabulous. I loved it because it’s really beautifully set to music. It’s live action as well as animation – a very strange film, very funny and quite ahead of its time. A beautiful marriage of music and image. I’m slightly disturbed by a lot of Disney animation. I feel like I’m being brainwashed when I’m watching it, like they’ve got some little insidious message that they’re getting across without you being aware of it. Which is why when I went to AIM and was introduced to all the Studio Ghibli stuff, which I just love – that really flipped me on my head in terms of what you can do.

Do you see music and animation as interlinked? Has being a musician helped or at least influenced the way you animate?

I’ve always felt quite divided about music and art. I rarely think of both at once. I either work purely on the visual side or on sound. I found when I made Hello that the best way to do it was actually to do the visuals first and then say, “OK that part is over, now it’s time to do the sound.” It’d be nice to think that being a musician would bring some kind of understanding of pacing or rhythm. It’s useful for music videos and I’ve started doing a few of those.

still from Hello © Jonathan Nix 2003

When you were doing the visuals for Hello were you aware of how it would sound?

Hello came from a conversation I had with my wife, Kathryn. She said how great it would be to have your own soundtrack, and as you were walking down the street the soundtrack would just kick in just like in Hollywood films. So I was quite conscious that these little characters were going to play music to each other – that’s how they’d communicate. I was confident that I’d be able to create the mood I wanted later. I’ve done a bit of soundtrack for theatre and a little bit for film, so I was quite relaxed about it.

How did you find moving into the realm of computer technology? Did you have any resistance or did you embrace it?

I initially found it really difficult and went through a stage of thinking, “I’m never going to understand how this works”. It seemed overtly complicated for what you got out of it. It was like a language I didn’t quite understand. I’d been working at creating music with a computer for a couple of years, which was good, because at least I had an understanding of filing systems and stuff like that. It really scared the hell out of me. That year at AIM felt like this real quantum leap. There’s so much packed into it, let alone learning animation. I really had to push through a lot of times when I’d think, “I just can’t get this”, or, “It’s really irritating me.”

Was there a Eureka moment where you thought, “OK, yeah, now I get it?”

There wasn’t really. When I did my first semester project, I got lost and ended up with something that didn’t tell a story at all. I got really obsessive about quality and resolution. I really couldn’t accept, and I still find it difficult to accept, the idea of making animation for video resolution. I find it really annoying. Particularly as I was doing all these drawings which could be any resolution and then crunching them down. It just didn’t make sense to me at all. In first semester I worked really hard on doing all this ridiculous stuff in After Effects. But I later realised that I’d learned a tremendous amount in that time, even though I didn’t end up finishing that project. I learned how not to do things and I got better at asking “how do I do this?” or looking it up.

It sounds like you also learned a bit more during that time about story-making and about time management.

That’s true. I had this quite expansive idea that would probably make quite a good 20-minute animation, really, and apparently that’s quite common. It’s your first foray into making something and you’re really excited and you want it to be this incredible thing and you learn – in my case the hard way – that that’s all very well but you’re not going to make it in three weeks. So when I started thinking about Hello I just wanted one simple idea.

still from Hello © Jonathan Nix 2003

You started with the character, didn’t you?

I did. The character came from a cassette player I have at home. I’d been thinking, “This looks like a little person, and it looks a bit sad”. It was a bit old and it didn’t really work very well. I pitched a completely different story to the class, which no one responded to, and then I just had this little drawing of the cassette head on this little body and I’d written: “This person is lost. This person has trouble communicating”. And that was it.

The class went, “Oh, that’s good. Someone who uses tapes to communicate”. So I swung it round and went with that.

Your script-writing teacher, Kate Cawley, told me that it was a character in search of a story as there were so many possibilities for it.

I had a lot of help from my teachers at AIM. They were fantastic. I’d been used to making music or images in a quite isolated, protective way and then presenting it to the public when I thought it was “ready”, which is the way I think a lot of artists and musicians work. Doing the animation course, I learned to try and relax and to really lay my work open for criticism and input from other people.

There’s a part in Hello where the female character actually plugs into the male character’s head – that was [course supervisor] David Atkinson’s idea. Great idea and it’s a really nice touch. I’ll think “I wish I’d thought of that”, but it doesn’t reduce the joy of the ownership.

I wanted to ask you about collaboration. You worked on a film clip, “Amnesia”, as part of your folio with Thomas Pullar. How did you find that experience of working with another animator?

I loved it, actually. It was really fun. It was unfortunate that we got to asked to make it in the middle of our major, and it was a huge amount of work. It was for a friend of mine, and I’d played in that band for quite a few years and had left to do the course. And he came in and saw some of the stuff we’d been doing. He had a really crappy budget – it was like 2,000 dollars – and I needed the money as well, so I thought, “Well, maybe I can somehow do both”.

It must have been a stressful time.

It was – a lot of not sleeping and staying up till 7 in the morning. I’d work on my major until 5 or 6 pm and then I’d start on the “Amnesia” video clip, and I’d work right through. And then I’d do it again. Thomas was great to work with because he’s quite uncompromising and if he thinks something doesn’t work he’ll just say it straight away. I’m not like that naturally but I ended up becoming like that because he was. It worked really well. It eliminated a lot of fuss.

Have you been finding work as an animator?

Some. There isn’t a lot around. The first thing I did when I left was make another animated video clip which turned out to be a massive job for virtually no money, which was a bit of a shame.

Was that through contacts?

Yes. Another band I used to play in. They had a new album that was being released in Europe and they wanted a clip. The record company said that what they wanted was something “really unique and stylish” but they weren’t, of course, prepared to pay. And it was ridiculous. It was 5 minutes and 20 seconds long and I got paid 3,000 dollars. It took me three months to make it.

That’s terrible.

It was terrible. I didn’t really think very intelligently about it – I ended up borrowing some money so that I could survive and make it, so it cost me money to make it. Still, it meant that I got another folio piece.

It’s very dispiriting though, isn’t it?

It was dispiriting. And in the end they didn’t seem to me to be very appreciative at all. Record companies are notorious for this. The guy I made it for was ecstatic and he loves it, which was good. And I learned a hell of a lot. I shot a lot of it on video and I did a lot of rotoscoping and some quite complicated compositional stuff as well. I learned a lot more about After Effects and compositing and getting things to look a certain way. It was all done on the computer so there was nothing hand drawn.

still from Hello © Jonathan Nix 2003

I’ve heard that you keep a lot of sketchbooks.

I’ve done a lot of travelling and my journals became my home, really. I did a lot of writing in them and a lot of sketching.

Are your journals a useful resource?

Journals are a great resource – the writing in particular is fantastic. I’ll write ideas down for songs and now I’m starting to write down ideas for films but also just things that have happened that seemed really mundane at the time. It’s great for bringing back the moment, obviously. You can read a paragraph and suddenly the whole day is real to you again. It’s also good because you forget things. I look back and I’ve forgotten ideas that I quite like. For creative people I’d really recommend it.

How do you describe Hello to people?

It’s a love story. It’s also about technology. The character is me, in a lot of ways. I went back to study as a mature-age student and there were all these people who’d come from media degrees who were quite adept at technology. They seemed really fluid. I didn’t have that. So I felt like the character in – a slightly older type of technology that was fumbling around trying to communicate.

..:: LINKS
Studio Nix
AIM website