Barking Film Series!

Computing the Outside World - Q & A with Grant Orchard

Grant Orchard, director of his own brand of quirky computer animated films, has quickly garnered attention. His Love Sport series, which started out with a few human dots bouncing around on a neon green computer generated field, was picked up by QOOBTV - the Italian division of MTV. QOOB funded a 10 part series of Love Sport. His first independent film debut “Welcome to Glaringly” was made for Channel Four. In the meantime, he feeds himself by creating spots for Virgin, Barclays, Smarties, Compaq and others….

As much as a primary colour palette and block-like human bodies can show an honest reality, these animated shorts do. Layered with humour and cynicism, Orchard’s short film work expose an ambivalent and often relatable outlook. “Welcome to Glaringly” criticises the media and its hypocritical readership, but Orchard offsets his opinions with a punchline, cushioning what could be a harsh indictment. “It’s just a messy, junky world,” Charlie Kaufman writes. Sure, and poking fun at it might be the only sane depiction.

Q & A with Mr. Orchard

Laura: Relating to Love Sport - are you a sports fan? Did the series come out of a real -life enjoyment of sports? Is it a criticism of the hyped up adverts and the glorification of people like David Beckham that surround the sports industry?

Grant: I’m a big sports fan. I’ve wasted untold hours in front of the box gormlessly digesting late night screenings of darts or snooker, curling, crown Green Bowling, sumo, hockey, anything on Trans World Sport. That’s my favourite.
I don’t just suck it up with my eyes; I’ve been known to participate too. “Park Foot Ball” was based on a lifetime of knocking a ball around a muddy green strip. There’s nothing overtly satirical or pointed about the Love Sport films. I do genuinely love sport, but I can also see why other people dislike it. There’s something inherently silly about all sports, and you don’t have to exaggerate them that much to make them laughable. With Love Sport though it’s all done, I like to think, in quite an affectionate way.

Laura: Why do you prefer to work in animation as opposed to using actors, sets etc? How does this change the director experience?

Grant: I suppose it’s down to the fact I’m not naturally confident. I do think you need that if you’ve got to coerce so many people to work with you. You do still work with people in animation but it seems to be in a quieter way.
With live action you have to project yourself and your ideas, but when you start off in animation, at least when I first got into animation at a student level, you have that option of keeping your ideas very much to yourself and to not come out of that shell until you have some kind of finished piece. I think that private, solitary way of working is inherent in most animators; you have to be fairly comfortable with your own company if you’re to sit and work on any project that requires you to draw, model, move something time and again with only the smallest of differences.

Laura: “Welcome to Glaringly” shows a fairly clear distaste for surveillance, yet you cloak what could have been a straightforward criticism with humour. Is this manner the way you prefer to construct your films or do you believe humour is a more effective way of engaging an audience?

Grant: With “Welcome to Glaringly” I was definitely making something satirical, but it wasn’t an attack on our Big Brother society, which I don’t actually have much of a problem with. It was more aimed at our habit of assuming guilt based on suppositious media reports. At the time of making the film the Pete Townsend and Jonathan King cases were in the press, and whether ultimately they were guilty or not, they were tarred and feathered before any official case was brought against them. There is a definite section of the media that tickle the balls of a story to an exploding point, whether there’s balls there to tickle or not.

Whether using humour to highlight these points is the most effective way of dealing with these subjects, I don’t know. Probably not, but it is a good shorthand way of raising issue with something. Only problem with that is that it’s prone to misinterpretation.

Laura: Could you talk about the difference between making your own shorts and making commercials? How often are you able to introduce your own creative personality into a commercial?

Grant: An advertising agency will get you in because there’s something about your existing work that they like, and they’ll want you to inject that personality into their brief. Ultimately it’s a co-production between me, the agency and the client, and to think of it solely as a personal project, I’ve learnt, is where the pain lies. Collaboration between those parties is where you find you do work that you might never do on your own, and it’s a good thing.
Stepping out of that and indulging yourself in purely personal work is a beautiful thing too, and you do have to re-stock the creative gene-pool now and again with some new ideas.

Laura: Your Love Sport series and “Welcome to Glaringly” both have a similar look to them. Are you going to continue with this computer animation feel? What else do you have planned for your own personal work in the future?

Grant: Yeah, I never meant for those films to have quite that computer ‘retro’ feel to them. With both projects I was looking for the purest, cleanest way of communicating those ideas. I could have used circles instead but I do like a straight edge. I’m a big fan of a straight edge. I’m currently working on a film using water colours, a lot of it is being done on the computer to get to the point when I can start slapping on the paint so it’s a good marriage of the old and the new. It’s being done in between commercial work so I’m thinking either I don’t earn and make the film by next year, or eat and finish it by the time of the London Olympics. Decisions decisions, eh?