Spotlight on :30 Animation
Film
Winner, Martin Moylan
by
Jeremy Hanke
This month, Irish animator Martin Moylan won our ":30 Animation Film Contest" with his short, "Big in Japan." As his prize, he won E-Frontier's best-selling 2D animation package, Anime Studio 5 Pro, and their best-selling 3D animation package, Poser 7. (Read our full review of Poser 7 here.) Additionally, he won $150 worth of online credit for models, costumes, backgrounds, and other enhancement at E-Frontier's affiliated store and artistic community, Runtime DNA.
After winning this contest right on the heals of his brother John winning our Spec Trailer Contest, we touched base with him to find out about his plans for the future.
JH: To begin with, Martin, how about you tell me a little bit about yourself as a animated filmmaker and where you're from.
MM: Hi Jeremy and thanks to you and your team for this great opportunity and this fantastic top notch prize to boot.
I grew up in the midlands of Ireland in county Laois, with an artistic family background, but I was the only one who went in the direction of animation when I studied at Ballyfermot Animation College Dublin.
This was a four year diploma course that was set up and coordinated in part by the animation director Don Bluth, whose work includes, An American Tale and Anastasia. Around then in Dublin, 'A Land Before Time' and 'Teenage Mutant Turtles' along with an assortment of 2D animations were being produced for the global audiences.
The course that I had taken was 'Classical Animation', this was the hand drawn 2D variety. The modules covered animation, storyboarding, film appreciation, as well as interior, landscape and character design.
One of the students from my year, Cathal Gaffney, went on to greater things when he set up his own animation company Brown Bag Films http://www.brownbagfilms.com and earned an Oscar nomination in 2002 for best animated short in 'Give Up Yer Auld Sins'.
Occasionally I would peer in to the Computer Animation Department. Back then the industry was still in its infancy, the software was quite technical and expensive for to produce any high quality production.
To put it in context, the biggest 3D animation show piece around at the time was the Terminator 2 metallic shape shifter, even pre dating Jurassic Park's breakthrough.
However a number of years later, I had done a course in Publishing and Multimedia which had introduced me to a new realm of computer design and animation.
Once I finally got a taste of CGI animation, things were never the same.
JH: It's clear that this provides a prologue to a larger work. Tell us the plot behind the complete animated work?
MM:The whole concept came in a flash when I was talking to a friend who returned from Paris, specifically to see Tom Waits perform live.
With his description of his performance along with listening to the first track of the album, 'Mule Variations', immediately an image of a singing dinosaur, possessed with the husky voice of Tom Waits , had lit up the animation side of my brain and has never been extinguished since.
The plot behind the work is that our Dinosaur, straight out of his egg with a lust for life, stomps through Tokyo singing his theme song, inadvertently demolishing buildings, crushing cars and causing utter chaos with every dance step and chorus line.
In its finale, our misunderstood rogue is now under fire and the army take him down to the ground in a hail of missiles as he dramatically squawks the remaining lines of the song.
However, recreating all the buildings at Ginza Plaza in Tokyo along with hundreds of miniature human characters running for their lives through the city, I knew that it was an ambitious piece that would take an extensive amount of time to construct before any animation could continue.
Very intentionally, I have never watched movies like 'Godzilla', just so that none of their ideas or themes pollute my own train of thought during development of the work.
MM: Hi Jeremy and thanks to you and your team for this great opportunity and this fantastic top notch prize to boot.
