Today we continue our annual tradition of getting to know the animators at the Sundance Film Festival. Our next animator to profile is Grace An who has a new short at the festival, Cabbage Daddy.
How did you get started animating?
GA: I guess I had quite a boring path. I got introduced to animation quite young from a family friend, and that’s what I studied in, although there were a few different trajectories along the way. I initially studied fine arts and then decided to graduate from film animation in the end. Since then I’ve been working various jobs, and I don’t think I really planned on being an animation filmmaker because when I was in school, I wanted to do a more stable path and get a job in a studio. But I just kept going with what I was good at and where I found opportunities and happened to become a filmmaker.
Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about Cabbage Daddy?
GA: I would say that Cabbage Daddy is very fast and perhaps confusing. It’s… I hope not boring. I think I wanted to make a film in the attention economy, so it is quite chaotic. It’s about mistranslations in Korean and English. There’s a lot of voices and words going back and forth, and the scenes cut quite abruptly.
It kind of looks like crayon drawing to me. Was that what you’re going for or what was that?
GA: Yeah, the film came from common misunderstandings when I was talking to my parents in Korean. I think I wanted to illustrate that with a bit of naivety and I think kind of mimicking children’s drawings…
So I think it is coming from my own perspective and I wanted to encapsulate that with the use of crayons. Although initially I just wanted to use crayons. And so when I was doing the kind of initial sketches, that’s what I wanted. But when I scanned all my drawings and when I did, I found that crayons were actually not as saturated. So I did use pastels in certain scenes just to get it to pop out a little bit more.
So you did the drawings and then you scanned them in and then into the software that you then used to animate?
GA: Yeah. And I think when I tell my technique to some other animators, they’re surprised that I don’t use an under camera setup, so like a camera and then you’ll make frames. But I personally just… I guess I’m fast at scanning and I don’t find it to be so troublesome. It just makes my… My scanner is very dirty from all the pastels and other animations I’ve worked on. And also it’s done on paper, but it’s manipulated digitally quite heavily. I’ve done a lot of work on the computer with the animation. It’s not all done on paper.
Were the human characters that you showed… Were those based on anyone in particular?
GA: I’m glad you asked that. No, they aren’t. I actually had some difficulty coming up with the character designs because when I initially came up with the script, I didn’t think… They’re like, it’s not a narrative. There aren’t… Or initially, it wasn’t supposed to be a narrative, although there are kind of recurring characters that happened accidentally. But when I was in pre-production, I didn’t think I needed character designs because I thought, “Well, there’s not going to be that many characters. It’s not really going to be as figurative as it turned out.” But as I was working, I was like, “Oh, there are quite a few characters, and it’s not really cohesive because I was just animating sporadically.”
And so I think that they don’t really match all the time, and I was really struggling. But in the… There’s like a running scene where there’s three characters running. And because I didn’t have a character sheet, I kind of drew that so many times and couldn’t figure it out and decided that I’m just going to give all the male characters bowl cuts. And that’s what ended up happening, and they all just had bowl cuts throughout the film.
You must have been so excited to get in the Sundance?
GA: Yeah, I didn’t think it was real at first. I thought it was spam when I got the call and email. So even after we got accepted for, I think a month, I thought they were going to take it away somehow, like before it was announced. The whole time I was getting nightmares that it was all a hoax or it never happened… The whole thing. So rather than excited, I was mostly just worried that they were going to take it away from me.
You can watch the full interview with Grace below and if you are attending the festival make sure to check out Cabbage Daddy as part of the Animated Short Film Program.