Commissioned for 20 Years of Pixar Exhibition

16 May, 2007

A bit more time travelling here.

In the first week of of the 2nd year of my course at ECA we (including some people who had only just joined the course) were marched down to the Nation Museum of Scotland to talk about making individual commissions for the up-coming 20 Years of Pixar Exhibition. A big step up from the usual slack pace that most animation courses run on. A lot of the course members suffered from the animation equivalent of The Bends to get over the learning curve. Some, I’m pretty sure cried themselves dry.

My pitch was originally to create filler animations for all the other films, includng a vague narrative of a museum curator going through it. Practically, this proved impossible to do as more people changed their ideas or ran away from the whole mess completely. So in the end, I tied the ideas together as a slightly ill-paced short, ‘DON’T TOUCH’.

The original, if not slightly prentious sounding bumpf was,

“I wanted to depict the intense fun that some children get from smashing things, running as fast as they can and causing general chaos! The animation plays on the anguish and frustration that childhood frivolity can cause grown-ups.”

So for an O.K. student film, it’s done pretty well. 2 years from the supposed date of this post it will have recieved over 250,000 views on YouTube which is very nice.

You can see all the other films at the 20 Years of Pixar mini-site (if it still exists). My personal favourites were:

Imagination Station - Grace Chan,
Vinyl Days - Mark Wagner,
The Penguin and the Piper – Aaron Johnston,
Yu-Lung’s Pearl – Natasha Harrison