Johnny Kelly

0:05[Applause]

0:15hello I'm very excited to be here slightly queasy if I'm honest and my name is Johnny Kelly I'm a director making lots of animation puppetry CGI stop-motion anything odd jobs mostly I work at an amazing place called Nexus Studios shortage I have a tendency to overcomplicate things like this project ♪

1:03I was just guessing but I also like making silly little loops like this and but today I'm going to talk about a project and that came out a few months ago called right on tracks and it's sort of an overview at glimpse behind the smelly curtains of directing puppetry this was the original brief from the agency 72 and sunny in New York so through music Cheerios is hoping to help parents spark conversations with their children on timely topics there's a lovely brief they'd commissioned Walter Martin who's a musician to compose four songs with the idea of being that we make four music videos to go with it and these would be tools that parents or teachers could use as kind of prompts for discussions about weighty topics like how to stand up to bullies at school or how other kids in your class might have two dads or as someone at school might look a little bit different and how you can welcome them.

2:35So yeah really lovely brief my process when I get a brief is it's a bit like that sort of montage moment in homeland where she posts loads of stuff and string on the wall in a kind of with free jazz playing but except in a in a sketchbook it's much less glamorous I rely on on sketchbooks as a kind of a brain dump a safe space to ask questions like this write down all your stupid ideas and with this project you know the agency had presumed mainly based on budgetary resources that it would be a 2d animated project and 2d animations wonderful but when I listen to these songs I you know they had this really loose spontaneous feel and what could have been a bit luxury or a bit kind of know-it-all you know just didn't feel like that at all it felt really kind of beautifully ramshackle so I just immediately thought of puppetry and I thought we could do it slightly cheaper and I had made this short film the year before called fern about a puppeteered plant that falls in love with a woman and vice versa little behind the scenes and what's it's so simple I mean because I showed you this because it's all it's just a rod basically and you take it away and you could still get an emotional performance you can you can do multiple takes which is a bit of a novelty for an animator in fact she had to eat a lot of sushi her she's a very good sport so how it worked it was really open I could think of how to interpret these songs what the scenes would be which is a joy for a director so I tend to storyboard myself they're not particularly pretty but they're functional and our process is that we put it together as an animatic like this and you know just the song and workout the pacing I'm thinking about how it how it looks we all kind of felt like it needed to stand out it needed to feel like the difference and I had just the year before worked with nuvvu who are an amazing illustration collective who I'm sure lots of you know because they've been regularly featured it's nice that elsewhere.

5:36And this was a project we did for our little snippet from a project we did for Facebook there they have this incredible talent at making these weird but relatable sort of beautiful freaks that I don't know something incredibly endearing about them they haven't had their work animated that much.

5:54So they were really excited about working on this project but for me like there's a lot of things I love about my job.

6:02But I think my favorite thing is you know your responsibility to help kind of gather a team be a kind of a matchmaker and you can take someone like nuvvu and say well what would it be like if you paired them up with Andy gent who was the public puppet master and model maker for all of Wes Anderson's recent stop-motion projects as well as Tim Burton's films and a ton of other stuff and they just come from diametrically opposed backgrounds and putting them together.

6:39And I knew from the first meeting kind of putting them together in Andy's workshop that something interesting would come out of it so nuvvu kind of went away there's three of them which helps and they came up with hundreds of characters you can see a lot of them didn't make it I love these there's a little accordion character a few other guys that didn't make it. And then.

7:05This is where it gets exciting you can give this design to Andy and his team and they come back with this and that always be a design process you know some of them would need to be adjusted like this pelican character was really sweet was it was hard to work out how that torso which would work physically so this was sort of a slight readjustment and then we got this video back from Andy and as much as I love the the graphic style I kind of didn't want to risk trivializing quite a serious message and so I thought it'd be nice to contrast that with quite semi-realistic backgrounds so this is the Sora sets and the lighting that we were looking at it's quite sweet and for this first film we had to show different types of families how they come in all shapes and sizes so a big inspiration on this project as on many projects was awkward family photos calm which is is amazing to be able to justify spending in an afternoon on this website for work I highly recommend it probably just should have had about 20 of these slides but so we had little awkward families like a motorbike family or a cat family or a dog you know a couple that absolutely loved their dog I like the idea of like all the pictures in their house being of this one dog at various stages of his life so one of the model makers made a little painting of this dog as a puppy and you won't see that because it's completely out of focus on the phone so this is an exclusive for tonight and they just finished I love dogs so they had a load of hair leftover I'll play this first film [Applause]

9:32and so many kinds of fans all over this great big country some kids have a single pair some are raised by their grandparents I love my foster mother. And I love my adopted brothers I love my two sweet father's I love my new stepdaughter you don't have a pet hotter sweetie yeah I do I need food put him on the back porch are you telling me you leave food for a wild otter on the back porch of our house ♪

10:41one thing we had to do is make them talk and the norm is kind of moving mouths but in a three-day shoot we didn't have enough time for that kind of carry-on we also wanted them to kind of blink and smile and so Mark Davies our incredible technical guru at Nexus sort of masterminded the system where we had kind of tracking markers tacked onto there painted onto their faces little X's for eyes and stuff that we could add animation on in post so the raw footage after after our rather exhausting shoot looked a bit like this.

11:22This is completely uncleaned up you can see the the rods and they look dead basically so and it's a little underwhelming for you know client we're like no no it's gonna be good Doric so our process was that gives you no idea the scale some of these were you know the smaller the cuter basically is is the formula and we got an incredible animator called Alistair brothers whose work you've seen even if you don't know his name to come in and do this facial animation bottom left and then we used what's called geo tracking to track these simple shapes and add quite complex textured animation to make it look like it was painted on frame by frame and what was nice was a gave us control in in post-production we could tweak things right up up until the final delivery here's this film ♪

12:44[Applause]

12:50you see in your kid to lose all love lonely let me tell you a nice thing that you can do yeah they might look different be from a cool country far away.

13:16But they like your company even if you don't have much sis just take a seat there let's watch your derriere so anyway I'm sorry what does derriere mean is that French yeah means your touch ♪

13:46[Applause]

13:58so in this last film I'm gonna show. There was a crucial pivotal moment where this character Larry kicks down it well I had this stupid idea.

14:06Basically that he'd kicked down at toilet stall and rescued the singer it'll make sense when you see the film. And it's easy to storyboard sitting on a couch at home a puppet kicking down a door it's quite a different proposition to make it happen in real life immediately I knew that this was Larry as soon as I cast eyes on him here's a little test of Larry kicking and we had to sort of design all these scenes and I'd sort of fall in love with as much as you can fall in love with a reference of a toilet and Callum Strachan at Nexus is a designer amazing designer there may just this and all the other scenes for Andy and his team to to work from and this is what it looks like when a puppet kicks a toilet stall down the best thing about it when you watch the film next is the creeks and crack there it really sounds like he's gonna knock it off the hinges well if you see it mean bully treating someone boom well it's hard to know what you should do so I wrote four simple steps tell the bunny's got me. And so help me tale grown-up like a teacher or tutor Oh your cousin Emma SCOOTER Store well you may be asking yourself how did this guy know.

16:02So well how to put a mean bully in there please well when I was a wee boy a bully was messing with me and the kid helped me out this way that kid is my best friend to this day he's also my organ player ♪

16:21[Applause]

16:25growing up like your granny Oh your nanny oh you kooky Franny ol inter ever kid you don't want to believe back cuz we all know it's true bullies need love too.

16:45So it was 70 setups in three days and major credit goes to our incredible producer Isabel Conroy who's here tonight for making that madness happen and I'm fully aware that these projects don't come along very often so I'm I'm super lucky to have worked on it if you know a child or have any children near you in the next file feel free to show them these and see what they think let me know and thank you so much for having me tonight good bye thank you [Applause]