Oregon's Animation Magic | Oregon Art Beat (full episode)

[bright music] [upbeat music] NARRATOR: At any given moment of the day or night, at dozens of studios across Oregon, a skilled and obsessive group of artists is making inanimate objects come to life. That's incredible. Thank you. I love animation because you can do anything. You create everything in the frame. Therefore, your imagination is the only limit. Every tiny little movement is a choice. This thing that has no life of its own is given life through the spirit of the animator. Hmm. It neve

r ceases to amaze me how enchanted it feels. It's just pure magic. NARRATOR: And here in Oregon, we don't just have some good animators. We have some of the best on the planet. In the animation world, this is considered a Mecca. There's a heart and soul that isn't always found in other places, and I think that's what makes Oregon animation special. NARRATOR: Oregon's Animation Magic starts now. [upbeat music] ANNOUNCER: Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by the Kinsman Foundation, Kay Kitag

awa and Andy Johnson Laird, OPB members, and viewers like you. Thank you. [dramatic cello music] 262. Just continue to the left leg, right arm. NARRATOR: It's the summer of 1973. Two filmmakers are experimenting with clay animation in the basement of their Northwest Portland home. Move his head toward that first picture. Okay. NARRATOR: They have no idea they're about to rewrite the history of film in Oregon. Okay. And shooting. You have to remember that this is a time when around the world, 98%

of animation was 2D cell animation, the classic Looney Tunes kind of animation. So just to even create an experiment with this was way out there. And shooting NARRATOR: 11 months later, their film is completed. It tells the story of an inebriated man who wanders into an art museum late one night. Oh. Ah! NARRATOR: And they finished just in time for the Northwest Film Festival. [man laughing] WILL: So we submitted the 16-millimeter print to the film center the last day that we could submit films

. ANNOUNCER: As the world turns-- NARRATOR: And almost immediately, their film is rejected. And we were devastated [laughing], really devastated 'cause I mean, I thought it was pretty good. NARRATOR: But a Northwest distributor loves the film and begins screening it at festivals at arthouse theaters up and down the West Coast. WILL: And we got terrific responses. In the end, we won hundreds of best of the festival awards. NARRATOR: And then in the spring of 1975-- And the nominees are-- Closed M

ondays, Will Vinton and Bob Gardner, producers. I was so honored to be nominated. And the Academy had never had a stop motion film prior to that that was nominated. The winner is Closed Mondays, Will Vinton and Bob Gardner. [audience applauding] It was an amazing experience and remarkable. I mean, I was shocked. [upbeat band music] Those were hairier days, and I remember saying something like, all I could think of was-- Hello, and and thank you to all our friends back home in Oregon. NARRATOR: W

ith a shiny new Oscar to his name, Will is on his way. [upbeat music] Over the next few years, he builds his own studio, employing dozens of animators, creating advertising, music videos, and more short films. Every film in that period was a creative wonder. Our criteria for the films was, have we done this before? What can we do that's really original and different? [whimsical classical music] What can we do that people have never seen before? NARRATOR: But one project stands out. WILL: Our age

ncy, advertising agency we had worked with before came with a great idea for the California Raisin Board to personify raisins. ♪ Don't you know that I heard it through the grapevine ♪ ANNOUNCER: Sounds grape, doesn't it? [whimsical music] I've never seen an overnight success like that. It was just amazing how popular it became and instantly. And it was on the news programs, national news. The Raisins grow from a single TV commercial, to an elaborate ad campaign, to a series of half hour TV speci

als. ♪ Then one foggy Christmas Eve ♪ NARRATOR: The California Raisins put Will Vinton Studios on the map. ♪ Oh yeah ♪ [engine stalling] [upbeat music] By 1999, he had nearly 400 employees creating weekly shows for network TV. Will Vinton had built the largest film studio Oregon had ever seen. I think because of Vinton Studios, so many people starting there and then going off to do other things, Portland is a stop motion capital of the world NARRATOR: But it wasn't just Vinton. There were other

independent animators, like Jim Blashfield who directed high profile music videos in the 1980s and '90s, and more recently, began creating animated installations. Joanna Priestley, director of the 1983 short, The Rubber Stamp Film, went on to direct dozens of animated films in Portland. Chel White won awards for his 1991 film Photocopy Cha Cha before co-founding Portland's Bent Image Labs in 2002. These and dozens of other artists helped plant the seeds for an Oregon animation scene that would g

row bigger and more vibrant with each new decade. I'm really proud of a lot of things that we did at Will Vinton Production and Studios 'cause we built such a great creative company. [melancholy music] JOAN: Originally, I had an idea that I would do a film of all of 20th century painting, and then I realized I had to narrow it down. So I decided to use the human figure in 20th century painting NARRATOR: Joan Gratz made every movement in the film using clay and stop motion techniques. Her film re

ceived an Academy Award for best short animation in 1992. Joan pioneered the technique of creating motion with a flat layer of clay using just a few tools and frame by frame animation. JOAN: If I'm doing clay painting, then I'll have lights balanced on either side of my image. If I'm doing high relief, I'll just have a single light source. I initially had a background in painting, and then I started taking photographs of the paintings and then at a certain point, realized I was actually animatin

g. MAN: Let's get ready for the next one. When I started working for Will Vinton Studios, we were in back of a barber shop on 19th and Lovejoy, and we could hear the barber and his son argue. The son would say, "I'm gonna dance on your grave." So that was, really, that was our entertainment as we slaved away in the basement NARRATOR: These days, she often relies on her computer to add effects to her clay paintings. [mysterious music] JOAN: The graphic quality of it becomes so much more important

, just the light and dark that's created by the light source. There's all these small actions that you execute, and then you come out with something that's far beyond that. But I think the other thing that I've always liked about it was the element of surprise. [bird squawking] [people chattering] [sighing] JEROLD: Today's a perfect day because the streets are wet. It's overcast. It's like the real Portland NARRATOR: Like a lot of Portland kids, Jerold Howard developed a rich imagination. CHUCKL

ING: It's a climate that encourages indoor activities, so my whole childhood was like reading comics and sci-fi magazines with the rain hitting my bedroom window. NARRATOR: When he wasn't indoors, Jerold was doing what most kids do. Being drug around by my mom as she ran errands and did shopping and bought groceries. And I remember driving past the Paul Bunyan statue in North Portland. And it was this magical thing of like magic, imagining him come to life and what would it be like, and just hop

ing that I could see him come to life. NARRATOR: What makes tier different is his ability to make those dreams come true. I figured out that animation wasn't just something you consumed. It was something that you can make. My next film is called Battlefield Portland. The main character is gonna be Paul Bunyan. The other character is sort of the spirit of Portland. And it's gonna be actual shots of Portland with these animated characters going through. I wanna capture the character passing throug

h this particular intersection 'cause it's, this is one of the intersections where a lot of changes happened. And hopefully, the film is gonna be sort of a funny take on the old Portland versus new Portland. This spot is really significant to me because I grew up really close to here. Yeah, I think it's looking good. I'm happy with this. NARRATOR: Jerold got his professional start at, you guessed it, Will Vinton Studios. I was there for two and a half years. And it was like graduate school for m

e. I remember being so like excited and wide-eyed, and I was like, this whole building is about making cartoons. It was exciting. NARRATOR: Jerold's talent took him all over the place, including that other animation capital, Bristol, England, the home of Wallace and Gromit Gromit, old pal, I'll need assistance. Ow! NARRATOR: For Jerold, Bristol felt a lot like Portland. They're like twin like universes [laughing], almost like the flip side of a coin. They're both port cities, and the weather was

almost exactly the same too. I felt right at home. More work started to happen here in Portland, so I wound up moving back to Portland. NARRATOR: Which is also home to the hit TV show, Portlandia and their animated rats. As usual, they're trying to forage for food and having some trouble. And they noticed that humans give food to squirrels, and they figure out that it just comes down to the tail. CARRIE: People have told me that. Their tails aren't, they're not fluffy. People like fluffy. NARRA

TOR: In this sequence, Carrie Rat thinks Fred Rat is being just a little bit neurotic about the whole tail thing. It's a bit of obsession with you. Yeah, it's an obsession for me to make our lives better. But is it constructive? Her line is, "But is it constructive?" A lot of times, what we can do is we can break that down into syllables. NARRATOR: Jerold will manipulate the Carrie puppet frame by frame until the Carrie Rat comes fully to life. Sometimes it's the weirdest little things that thro

w a shot off, like her thumb was too high and it looks sort of accusatory. So I brought it down so it's a little bit more of a friendly gesture, just her thumb. Jerold Howard is one of the very best stop motion animators in the world. He has an incredible command of action and comedy. At the same time, he's able to really get into the soul of the character. But is it... One thing I gotta say, Fred. You're doing a lot the last few years or so of like comparing yourself to other animals. It's a bi

t of an obsession with you. Yeah, it's an obsession for me to make our lives better. We gotta do something about this, don't you think? JEROLD: This experience, it's knowing the scale of something and knowing that a certain movement is gonna give you a certain speed. It's about managing your inner monologue. My inner monologue is like chip, chip, chip, go, go, go. Oh, peanut, jump. After doing it for a while, it becomes a little bit easier. But is it constructive? I, my existence is having thing

s thrown at me. And a little OCD does not hurt at all. NARRATOR: Projects like Portlandia support Jerold's living, but it's his own films that feed his soul. [jazzy music] JEROLD: See the Truth was a film I did in 2002 after working on commercials for a number of years. Hmm. Ah. It's about family and bias and how that gets passed on from generation to generation in a family structure. [man shrieks] The film is about a parent, and he's put in a situation where he has to question what he's been te

aching his child and what he himself has been taught when he was a child. Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm. NARRATOR: See the Truth showed at festivals and on HBO. Huh. [chuckling] [door creaking] NARRATOR: Today, Jerold's working on his latest film, Battlefield Portland, you remember, the one with the distinctly Portland twist. JEROLD: Preserving Portland versus developing Portland. People feel so passionately about living here and what it means to live here. NARRATOR: And if you do, it's a good idea to hav

e something to keep you busy, no matter what the weather. I think sort of the more you get into it, the more you're sort of performing through the character. It never gets boring because it's not like you've, you never really completely master it. In every project, I feel like I learned something. That's kind of fun too. I am looking forward to Paul Bunyan actually coming to life. [ax chopping] [tree falling] When I say I animate people, think of LAIKA, Will Vinton, especially if you're in Portl

and, but there's this other world of, and animators know it, the independent film scene. [bells ringing] [lamb bleating] And I think that that has evolved, and I think my work is a part of that evolution that has expanded the notion of screen and taken animation into installations, into architecture, into public space. [fireworks blasting] [men grunting] That's what my pieces are like. They're like these carefully chosen vignettes that taken as a whole convey something. Being able to put a frame

around a daydream I think is what I do. My work is really grounded in a lot of research. I've always enjoyed the drawing part of it, but what's come with the installation is this people part of it. MAN: Eight. Go. There's a hitch there. I want to see if that's in the animation or not. MAN: Three. Go. Turangalîla is a mid-century avant garde piece of music by Olivier Messiae. [mysterious classical music] And the Oregon Symphony wanted a visual component, and so they approached me. The symphony i

tself is 75 minutes long. I'm looking at this as my first feature. And off. You want those, all of that full stuff off or-- I didn't go at this to illustrate this symphony. It does not need illustration. It's more of an interpretive approach. Sometimes my imagery will match or go with the music, and sometimes it is sort of a counter punctual kind of event. [dramatic classical music] It's like a feature that's played live so it's slightly different every night. [suspenseful classical music] With

this piece, people are like in their seats. And I didn't know exactly what the response to that could be because we were breaking a lot of rules. We were not doing the movie screen. We were all over the walls. We were all over, almost up on the ceiling. People really appreciated, I think, the bravery of the piece, the bravery of the orchestra to bring something new and something really Portland-made to our city. NARRATOR: This sprawling Hillsboro warehouse holds an intriguing secret. Inside, the

re's a bit of Hollywood right here in Oregon. Hundreds of artists work long hours creating Oscar nominated films like Coraline, Box Trolls, ParaNorman, and this year's new film, Kubo and the Two Strings. This is LAIKA, one of the largest stop motion studios in the world. It doesn't get better in stop motion than LAIKA. Choose great stories to tell, and they execute them at a level that just blows people's minds. NARRATOR: LAIKA's origin goes back to the late '90s. Will Vinton Studios was seeking

investors and Nike co-founder, Phil Knight, stepped in. Within a few years, Knight owned the company. Soon, Vinton was replaced by Phil Knight's son, Travis, a Vinton Studios animator at the time. Travis loved stop motion animation, and he did very well. He started out at a low level and made his way up, became a very good animator. NARRATOR: As the studio transitioned from Vinton to LAIKA, they faced a big decision. When we started LAIKA, we saw the ascendancy of computer-generated imagery. St

op motion was on life support and somebody was about to pull the plug. So we took this art and craft and we fused it with technology. We fused it with the very thing that was essentially trying to destroy our livelihoods, which was the infernal machine, the computer. And once we realized that technology really is just another tool in the arsenal of an artist, it changed everything. It made the canvas bigger. When you design for stop motion, you start with zero, and that's one of the things I lov

e about it. It is a clean slate, and you have to create everything. From the dirt and the trees, to the architecture, to the props, everything has to be conceived of and built. And it's like when you read a book and you're imagining what it might look like. Well, I have to make that. So when I read a script, I'll just let my imagination kind of go and think, what could this look like? I think Kubo is, the look of it is essentially fantasy. It's based on real geography and real history and real r

eference, but there's also a giant beetle running around and a talking monkey. Can you hear me, Kubo? [Kubo gasping] There's a brief passage in the script about a ship being made of origami and floating on the sea. And I remember reading that and thinking, well, that's gonna get cut. It's too hard to do. But it didn't get cut. This is the cemetery set that Kubo spends quite a bit of time in, and we used all sorts of strange materials. There's dyed cut up wedding dresses on this as moss. A lot of

the particulate that we use is ground up Walnut shells. And these trees are cast urethane and then they're covered with just brown craft paper. It makes a beautiful zigzag pattern so you can just kind of do that with your finger and you have instant bark. [suspenseful music] SISTERS: Kubo. We've been looking for you for so long. Costume's important in all story and all film. But in stop frame animation, it's very specialist. It involves a lot of engineering underneath the costume. Our costumes

are so intricate, and our puppets are all handmade, so each puppet is slightly different from the other one. The Sisters' cloak was quite an adventure. For us, it was new territory working in armature into a costume piece. All of the feathers, they're all attached to a wire structure which has a scaled concertina effect so that if you open up the cloak, all the feathers move smoothly but they also move back into place as well. NARRATOR: One of the innovations LAIKA brings to stop motion animatio

n is 3D printing. For each character, LAIKA artists create hundreds, sometimes thousands of different facial expressions. So Kubo, the character, has over 11,000 mouths, 4,000 different eyebrow expressions. And when you combine those eyebrow and mouth expressions together, he has over 48 million possible facial expressions, which is far more than any other stop motion animated character in history. I encourage you not to die. [whimsical music] I encourage you not to die. So what an animator woul

d do is they'd be out on set with a puppet like this. They'd remove the bangs, and they would remove a facial expression, both the mouth and the eyebrow. And then they'd have a whole box of different facial expressions, and they would go in there and replace them with a slightly different expression, and then put the bangs back on. And then there is a split line or a seam line that is then digitally erased in post production. [serene music] The pace of an animated film is ridiculously slow. On a

ny given week, an animator will produce anywhere from three to five seconds of finished footage. So these things can take a very, very long time, which is why when we devote our energy to it, it has to be something that we love. What's special about stop motion animation is that what you're actually seeing is the will, the spirit, the imagination, the work of an artist's hands. I think that's just, it's like the closest thing that I've ever seen to magic. Once we got through a story that that wa

s this expansive, it made me realize that we could basically tell any kind of story. And it's really exciting to know that we could take this medium where it's never been before. [dramatic music] [laid back music] [dog barking] WILL: Animation in Oregon is continuing to grow and flourish, and I think it's gonna get better and better. I'm very happy to be working in this medium. I'm just riding this wave that is animation. We're coming into a place that's kind of like the wild West. Now with LAIK

A, and HouseSpecial, and Bent, and ShadowMachine, and all these places just keep growing. And people leave one of 'em and will go to and start another one, and then that builds. I'm really proud of what we've built here in the region. It's been a lot of fun to see the growth of the industry here in Oregon and to see it continue to be a hub for animators all over the world. When you drop an eyelid. [upbeat music] WOMAN: It's magic. This particular bowling ball will move the character and nod the

head around and up and down. It's the mouse. ♪ Bom bom bom ♪ WOMAN: Yeah.