My initial inspirations for what would eventually become my Extended Practice project came on a trip in the summer of 2017 to Annecy Animation Festival in France. Trips to animation festivals have always served as useful catalysts for sparking creativity, many of the best animations I have produced in my time since starting my studies at university have come about after trips to animation festivals, and my week long trip to the south of France was no different. My main takeaway from the week was a mocking nickname we devised for one of our mates which served as the inspiration for a character which would go on to star in my final project at uni; Monsieur Sausage.
Monsieur Sausage is a character I sketched out in my moleskine sketchbook in between festival screenings at Annecy. His backstory began as a humorous way to rip on my friend, however as the week went by a more clear picture began to develop of a character who worked as a street sausage vendor in the south of France, sort of like a character from a Disney movie, trying to serenade a young woman. As I began to develop the design of the character and aesthetic of the world he inhabits I imagined humourous scenarios for him to interact and how best this could be achieved harnessing my strengths as an animator. So far over the course of the three years I’ve spent at uni, the focus of many of my animations has been on art-direction and pre-production, so hoping to push myself to the edge of my abilities, I set out from the beginning to focus of body language and character animation, things I have reflected on as being shortcomings in the past.
Aesthetic-wise, due to the setting (South of France) my mind immediately jumped to Slyvian Chomet of ‘The Triplets of Belleville’ fame for his painterly backgrounds, lanky character designs and focus on mid-century French architecture. I was also drawn to the cinematic technique of ‘La Nouvelle Vague/The New Wave’ (something I touched upon in researching for my CoP2 essay), of directors such as Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard. If I was going to be creating an animation set in France, I wanted it to feel authentically French, or at least familiar with the history of French culture. I sought to emulate a lot of the live action techniques of Godard and Truffaut, making a list of notable New Wave film cliches that myself and others had picked up on, such as the fly on the wall feel to the camerawork, 4th wall breaks, unconventional staging, frames within frames etc.
However, while I did want the mood and tone of the animation to feel authentically french in a modernist, mid century sort of way, my intent with the story from the beginning was to inject this aesthetic with an ironic, cynical gaze; something deconstructivist yet playful, a celebration of French culture but also a savage parody of it from the perspective of an ignorant outsider. Tonally, with the story my goal was to emulate the shocking, ultraviolent, gross-out style of early 2000s internet animation; the sort of animations you’d stumbleupon when you were 9-10 years old on websites that you weren’t supposed to be on, with questionable and excessive content. Harry Partridge and Happy Tree Friends immediately come to mind. Part of my reasoning for seeking to create something with this specific tone and style comes from my experience at Annecy at the screening Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Animation Showcase, which at the time brought upon a sudden rush of nostalgia and inspiration for how I would approach my grad film. A lot of the shorts, which plausibly could have been lifted from Newgrounds or shown late at night on Adult Swim, reignited the passion in my to produced humourous, over the top animation for the purpose of pure entertainment. That’s my goal with Extended Practice; to produce something stupid, vulgar and memorable which could plausibly be shown at the festival one day as a part of the student film screenings of Spike & Mike showcase.
