Animation Saved My Life
How this particular medium made my creativity blossom again
As a kid growing up in the 80s, I wanted to be two things — a writer and/or a filmmaker. Well more to the point, I just wanted to be a storyteller, using either of these two mediums to do so. Unfortunately, I was a lousy writer at the time (even though I devoured books), and filmmaking was a pipe dream (this being the days when you could only shoot on celluloid, and film school was harder to get into than Fort Knox). However, I was a good artist, and created my own characters, creatures, and even comic strip stories. I was infamous in school for drawing on other boys' schoolbooks (including one memorable zombie massacre in a graveyard), though was also considered a very good artist by my teachers. But art simply wasn’t enough for me, and I wanted to be a serious writer or filmmaker. I never gave animation any real thought; associating it with silly and simplistic Saturday morning cartoons.
That viewpoint changed in 1992, when I discovered three pieces of brilliant animated storytelling — the Batman animated series, The Wrong Trousers, and Akira. All three were very different entities, but they finally showed me animation’s potential as a serious storytelling form . . . and also made me realize that this medium bridged the worlds of art and cinema, so it was just perfect for me. I later applied to Ballyfermot College in south Dublin, and being accepted, started the basic animation course in 1993. I learned the traditional forms of classical and stop motion animation first, but ignored both when I next spent two years studying computer animation — this being at a time when CGI was a new and exciting area (Jurassic Park had just come out the summer before). But after three years of college and dreams of moving onto my own animation jobs/projects, and hopefully film projects, I instead fell into a temporary post office job, and then drifted through various graphic design jobs where I barely used what I had learned . . . my incidental computer skills more important to employers than any artistic ones. This lack of creative stimulation reached a low point in the 2000s when I suddenly found myself filling out excel documents in a cubicle, and doing no creative work whatsoever. My spirit was sapped, and I felt my potential was wasting away, my future forever doomed to a dreary office existence.
Until 2008, when I grew determined to make a short film, even if only once and no one ever saw the damn thing. I had started to write prose fiction in 2007, my very first short story having been accepted for publication in an anthology — so that was very encouraging and made me want to tell more stories, if this time in a audio-visual medium. So I wrote a short ghost story set on an Irish beach; at first intending to make it live-action, but later decided on animation as that was more practical and offered full creative control. I was all prepped to start the storyboards, and then the script — which I had foolishly never printed out — vanished without trace from my computer. I was of course devastated, seeing this as some sort of omen to abandon my dream. But then I looked to a short gothic horror poem that I had recently written, and thought ‘well, why not animate this?’ So feeling determined again and not wanting to give up, I spent the next year-and-a-half making what became One Winter’s Night . . . with my own hand drawn digital animation, and narration by my friend Siobhan, the whole project being a long, if essential learning curve. I uploaded the finished short to Youtube in May 2011, and despite an enthusiastic response from friends, I thought it would soon disappear into Internet oblivion. But that was okay, for at least I had finally made something worthy of my talents.
But OWN didn’t vanish into oblivion, and slowly but surely built up an online following (1.3 million views to date). I would be astonished over the next few years when various teachers messaged me, and asked permission to teach the poem’s text in their classrooms (as an example of Gothic storytelling). In 2012 I released my second short animated film Waiting to Youtube, and again it has amassed a cult following over time — becoming my most popular piece so far (three million views to date). On a maybe-or-maybe-not whim I submitted this short for consideration to the 2013 Belfast Film Festival judges, and was delighted to have it accepted (despite it originally being a Youtube piece). So Waiting played on a big screen and in the short film category competition (which it didn’t win, but the acceptance was more than enough), and was also accepted at a few other smaller festivals after that, as was One Winter’s Night. All this recognition for my art and storytelling, however big or small, had made me very happy.
After that, life got in the way and I didn’t really upload anything new, bar some minor animations and old stuff, but I returned to animated shorts proper in early 2019 — and was happy to find my audience still waiting there for me. I now try to upload new stuff every so often, even during the current pandemic when (like many of us right now) I might not be in the most inspired of moods. And while I’ve dabbled in live action, I would now rather work in animation for its own sake, because it combines art, music, writing, character acting, sound design and most importantly, storytelling — and all under my control with no compromises, be that good or bad (I’m an independent animator and only work on my own ideas). That said, I am writing far more prose now (and much better prose too), so I probably won’t use animation as a storytelling tool forever, as the process gets increasingly tiring as I get older. But the medium really did save me years ago, and made me flourish again when I thought my creativity had all dried up — so I’ll be forever grateful to it.
I actually found that missing ghost story script a few months ago . . . in an old laptop folder where I had accidently moved it without realizing at the time. So maybe that tale is one of many waiting to be realized before I leave animation, and watch this space. And to any budding animators out there, I’ll just say go for it — as there’s just no excuse anymore with today’s easily accessible technology and the Internet for any knowledge/exposure. Just make sure you put those hours into the work, and with genuine passion too.