Apple - Creative - Pump-Action Animation, p. 1/2

Call them Tiny Toy Stories. That’s what Pixar Animation Studios calls its animated films produced entirely on computers. The precursors to animated classics such as Toy Story and A Bug’s Life, these brilliant shorts include The Adventures of Andre and Wally B and Luxo Jr., the first 3D animated film to receive an Academy Award nomination.

They also launched a revolution in animation, inspiring a new breed of filmmakers, Phil “Captain 3D” McNally among them. McNally’s four-minute animated short Pump-Action won first prize for best comedy/parody at the 2000 Shockwave World Internet Animation Competition. It also earned a screening before 3,000 colleagues at the Siggraph 2000 conference in New Orleans, where McNally observed audience reactions.

“Everyone laughed in the right places,” McNally recalls, “and showed genuine appreciation for my piece. I could not have hoped for better when I started the project.”

Macs have been my preferred computer since 1991 ...

First, the rules
It all started when McNally visited the London Effects and Animation Festival in 1998. He realized if he wanted a job in the animation industry, he needed more than a demo reel full of spinning logos and spaceships. He needed a demo that told a story. And he needed self-imposed guidelines to help him create it.

On a piece of paper he wrote:

1. Single location to minimize set construction and lighting
2. Characters without facial animation
3. Plastic surfaces to guarantee texture success
4. Four minute length maximum
5. Not Toy Story-like toys

“I tormented my college friend Jez Pearson about this list during a train journey from Scotland to London when he suggested those twisted balloon animals you see at parties,” McNally says. “We started brainstorming and came up with Balloon Boy and Vic Vinyl before we arrived home.”

Vic Vinyl is a nasty inflatable toy who enjoys making life difficult for Balloon Boy and Balloon Dog while the plastics company which created them is closed for the weekend. Fans of the film Reservoir Dogs will get a kick out of the references to a certain deserted warehouse and Vic’s Mr. Blond-like antics.

Requires QuickTime.

One person, one Mac
	“The toughest part of any story is just that — the story,” Phil McNally explains. “I don’t class myself as a natural storyteller and Pump-Action was a safe approach for my first film.” First, McNally sketched an animatic (animator talk for a moving storyboard) which shows a much different sequence of events. “Knowing how hard it would be to get through the animation and digital production, I put a lot of effort into storyboarding to avoid wasting animation in the final edit.” “I followed that with a clay figure animatic shot with a Sony TRV 900 mini DV video camera.” “Finally, I shot the whole thing live with actors in the front room. I could plug the camera directly into my Power Mac using FireWire and edit away at it, refining the shots. If something wasn’t working, I could easily reshoot a new angle and drop it in.” For a closer look at McNally’s process, see The making of Pump-Action.

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