Winner: Destroyer Of Worlds – Will Anderson

The winning film was produced by Edinburgh based animator Will Anderson, who in 2013 won the BAFTA for Best Animated Short for his graduation film, The Making of Longbird. Will’s film, Destroyer of Worlds, uses the medium of elegant shadow animation to tell the story of warfare from the earliest days of mankind to the atomic bomb.

Anderson, who premiered his latest short, Monkey Love Experiments, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on Sunday, said::
“I found the recording from J. Robert Oppenheimer speaking on a television programme about the ‘Atomic Age’ to be particularly moving (see video below). This father of the atomic bomb describes the horror of the first successful detonation of the atomic bomb. When giving a 10 second film a go, I felt that this quote should be my starting point, and the challenge (as well as it being incredibly short) was to try to communicate how we seem to have been killing each other since the dawn of time. It strikes me that this is pretty heavy stuff, so that’s why I decided to make it with shadow play. It feels very simple, but it hopefully says quite a lot.

“When I make an animation, I always look to match the process with the story told, in some way… and there seemed to be clarity in trying to talk about something huge in the simplest way possible, and in hardly any time.”

Juror Beeban Kidron, director of InRealLife and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, said of Will’s film:
“To tell such a big story with such elegance is impressive. It does a lot of heavy lifting, but with amazing simplicity.”

Second place: Groundsman – Dave Young / Pod Films

Dave Young was awarded second place for his film, Groundsman which captures the friendship of two groundsmen at a rugby club. Both the third place winner, MHM Mubassir and student winner Kazi Ali Tamaddun live in Bangladesh – and unusually, both are pursuing advanced degrees alongside filmmaking. MHM Mubassir’s film Dependence was awarded third place. In it, he shows the tenderness between a young boy afraid of the dark, and his mother lighting a candle for him.

Third place: Dependence – M H M Mubassir

Student award: The Last Act – Kazi Ali Tamaddun

Stuart Cosgrove, director of creative diversity at Channel 4 and chair of the jury panel for 9.88 Films said:

“Will Anderson’s winning film blew everyone away. The storytelling skill, and lightness of touch with such a huge theme was fantastic to see. And at the other end of the spectrum, MHM Mubassir’s Dependence was almost portraiture – a study in calm, sparse, confident and simply beautiful storytelling.

“Groundsman was a wonderful example of a well-rounded and warm documentary in just a few seconds, while The Last Act was incredibly complex and meaningful. As with so many of the entries, it was amazing to think that all this was conveyed in just 10 seconds.”

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

01. Handyman at Butlins. 

This involved making small repairs to holiday chalets – among the most common was repairing window locks. It was Minehead in Somerset and I was a teenager. I worked out what I thought was the perfect scam with two Scottish chalet-maids, I reckoned that if they listed bogus problems at their chalet I would then go and ‘repair’ them. We were caught within a week and disciplined but not sacked.

02. Assistant Northern and rare soul scene.
I moved from Perth to the North of England at 18 to pursue a lifetime passion for northern and rare soul. My job was unpacking records and then later in life acting as a ‘finder’ – an assistant who discovers records in ghetto shops in the USA, this coincided with studying for my PhD in the USA. I specialised in Washington DC.

03. Journalist – Black Echoes & NME. 

I started off writing for soul fanzines and moved to Black Echoes as a feature writer, then up through the ranks to become Media Editor of the NME, after a brief spell lecturing in Film and Media and boring people rigid about the semiotics of cinema. I was in very real danger of surrendering to the full-blown pretension.

04. Producer and Company owner Big Star.
From 1990 onwards against the backdrop of Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture I set up and ran one of Scotland’s most successful indies – Big Star, which produced the po-mo variety-show Halfway to Paradise. I worked with my business partner Don Coutts a key ally and mentor. I loved running my own company but if truth be told its a tough gig, success brings with it more pressures and creative responsibilities than failure.

05. Channel 4 

After a few years running the indie start-up Big Star I went to a producer day and was effectively poached by Channel 4 to join them as a commissioner in first Independent Film and Video working with new talent like Shane Meadows, Clio Barnard and Paul McGuigan. It was the beginning of a 14-year love-affair that still lasts to this day I am now Director of Creative Diversity. The constants in my life.

//////////

We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Theft divides opinion, its callous to those who own and liberating to those who don’t, but in art and creativity the ‘art of theft’ or the theft of art, takes on a very different character and a richer palate of meanings. 

In 2004 the Manchester artist Chris Ofili came clean “I like hip-hop’s cut and paste attitude,” he said, acknowledging that is best work was torn, reassembled juxtaposed and yes, stolen.  In ‘An Afromodern hip-hop thang’ a previous blog on Central Station I argued that a deep strain of appropriation and creative borrowing lay at the heart of the contemporary afro-modern movement.

Bootsy Collins would have called it, ‘shake and take’ bootzilla baby. But he couldn’t be bothered.

As I dig deeper beneath the layers of afro-modernism I see a recurring pattern of concentric creations, impossible to really work out where the beginning begins and the end, ends.

Chris Ofili’s ‘The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars’ (1999) reworks images of blaxploitation and takes its title from the astronautic name of a ‘B’ list Philadelphia funk singer, Captain Sky, who in turn was a cheap Xerox of the master of afromodernism, the eccentric funk legend Gorge Clinton, Bootzilla’s buddy.

Clinton only stole periodically, but he was stolen from throughout the nineties. His look was comically mad, acid-specs, pink hair and comic-strip paranoia. He wove great tapestries of funk which tore up the galaxy and rarely returned to earth: his mind a maggot brain of ideas, and inspirational images.

It was Atomic Dog that really caused the trouble, so propulsive, catchy and canine. Atomic Dog -Bow Wow Wow Yippee Oh Yippee Ay. The afromodern gangstas of hip-hop loved it, they recycled it nightly, and in the case of Cordozar Calvin Broadus aka Snoop Doggy Dog fashioned an entire career out of the lyrical memories of old ‘70s music and the assertive chic of his own self-proclaimed doggystyle.

So music was ripped and torn and yet the theft was curious in its intensity each stolen beat or borrowed image was in some ethereal sense a quote, a reference back to true greatness and in the case of Ofili and Snoop recognition of the unbridled greatness that had preceded them.

For afromodernism the first law of creativity is neither theft nor gentle appropriation it is a tender form of heist where the victim is adored and deeply loved.

It’s like Bootzilla baby a weird and complex thang.

Find out more about Stuart Cosgrove here. See more about Chris Ofili on Artsy.

/////

Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.