Caitlin Mccarthy

0:04[Applause]

0:14thanks for clapping so oh hello again I'm Caitlyn I'm an animator and I make stuff that looks like this.

0:27So this is if sor was a frog so the things that I'm showing you here are mainly things I did quickly for fun but they're probably more representative of what I do than like client stuff I guess I actually haven't been animating very long it's been about two years I think I studied illustration at cwell and that was quite like a broad loose course.

0:55So I ended up making very pretentious video art I'm going to show you some so here I eating seven cheeseburgers dipped in strawberry milkshake the full videoos 14 minutes so these are the highlights thank you.

1:14So basically the minute I graduated I stopped doing that. And I went back to kind of drawing and I started trying out some animation.

1:28So these are some of my first attempts at animating some of them were done with a trackpad which you might be able to tell so I was getting into animation I ended up meeting a animation director called parallel teeth also known as Rob Wallace he was working on this music video for a musician called MC the song's called I'm easy and he let me kind of come and work on it with him which was my first job ever really.

1:52So I got to do like some character design and basically Rob taught me to animate from scratch one of my housemates referred to him as my drag mother recently which I think is apt so I also got to know all the people at strange beast when I was on this job. And that's who represents me as a director now. So it was quite a formative kind of job for me but today mainly I'm going to talk about my film. And that's called coldsaw yeah.

2:26So I didn't study animation. So I kind of didn't get to do a grad film.

2:30So this is like my equivalent of it it took a whole year to make which is quite a long time for something. That's only two minutes but I'll let you watch it now ♪

2:32cool thank you thanks hope you liked it so about the film. Basically nobody was willing to get off of me until I was in my 20s and that's kind of the main place that it came from but also I really like teen movies so this was kind of my version of a teen romcom so these are just kind of some of my favorites that inspired me.

5:37So I watched a lot of these kinds of movies when I was a teenager where like there's a female protagonist who is really lame and becomes really hot and popular and they're kind of bit of sweet for me I guess because yeah. I was a very awkward teenager and I think I knew that they were really unrealistic storylines but I kind of embraced the false hope that they gave me and just sort of expected to randomly become also hot and popular just out of nowhere so for cold saw I wanted to make something that was like these teen movies but a bit more accurate to my experience and like it was definitely important to me to not have a happy ending because I think actually being a teenager is really.

6:28And I wanted to vindicate my younger self I guess so a large chunk of the film takes place on the internet I'm a big internet fan I particularly like observing the behavior of men online because it's often disgusting so this scene is one of my favorites it's just her getting messages from all the creepy men so it's also kind of throughout the film there's quite a lot of scenes like this where you probably won't catch all the jokes on First Watch but if you do ever watch it again then you can go back and pause my favorite one of these messages is do you use pad or tampon I didn't actually come up with that my producer Kitty did so thank you kitty another reason it was really important for me to have the internet play a big part in the film is basically when I was younger I spent a lot of my time on like horrible weird forums talking to freaks the internet was a lot more Anonymous it was a bit like the wild west when I was growing up. So it was like a great thing for a socially anxious teenager because you could have these simulations of formative experiences that you were too afraid to have in real life so like I would stay up all night in these like group video chats with my internet friends or that I couldn't look a boy in the eyes but I did have several internet boyfriends but yeah that's enough about my personal issues let's talk about making the film.

8:01So yeah I work quite spontaneously I fill in gaps as I go along I also delete files as I go along because I my computer doesn't have enough storage so I don't have like a huge amount of behind the scenes stuff to show you.

8:13But I thought it might be nice to see these original character sketches that I did for the two main characters you might notice there is a boy in some of them originally there was going to be a boyfriend for the popular girl and they were going to have like a really disgusting make out session.

8:27But I I don't know how to draw a handsome man so I got rid of him.

8:34So these are just some comparison shots from the animatic and the final thing an animatic is just like a moving storyboard I usually just go straight into animatic because photoshop's open and it's yeah easier obviously I work very rough in the early stages so I just thought it might be satisfying for me and for everyone else to see like the transformation that it goes through another thing I really wanted to talk about is the color palette so this is the color palette of the film on the top it's also just my stock palette basically I use it for everything it's kind of girly and childish which I think works really well for a dark story line cuz I don't really like to be sincere or Earnest so if you use like a bright happy color palette it like avoids becoming like edgy or like really sad when you are actually talking about I guess quite a depressing subject and the image below is a shelf in my bedroom basically I collect toys and knickknacks that I like find on the street or in charity shops and that's what kind of inspires the color palette so I think it has that balance of like depressing and happy because these are mainly things that people have thrown away and didn't want anymore but also they're really fun to look at yeah.

9:55So I do every frame by hand I like draw things over and over and over again and it takes a really long time.

10:06So the kind of overall look of my work is like quite unpolished quite wobbly kind of flickery I do that for a couple of reasons the first one is that it can hide bad animation hopefully so you can get away with a lot more if everything's all over the place all the time also it's kind of just relaxing so once you've got all the animation done you can just like spend two days coloring in a shot and I guess it's kind of like those adult coloring books but it's my job which is cool also I guess it just feels a bit more human than if it was like really slick and digital and it you can kind of tell that someone was really sitting there and doing it for a year.

10:51So the final thing I wanted to leave you with is my favorite review of the film I have censored out all of the like really racist anti-semitic stuff with that really nice Photoshop brush but I wish he'd left this comment separately because I I I would have liked to keep it up.

11:15So it says truly grotesque unwatchable uncomfortable hurts to view this gives intelligent people diarrhea the feeling I get while watching this is like the exact opposite of really good endorphins hopefully you know what orphin are is the feeling you get when someone rubs fingers through your hair th this film is the opposite this is just pain and vomit and uncomfortable so I hope you feel the same thank you [Applause]