Before making films and animation I was obsessed with drawing detail. My art teacher at secondary school, Mrs Livingston, wasn’t sure about me making animation, suggesting illustration. She was cool by the way, and very supportive, but for some reason making things move seemed like the hardest and possibly most rewarding artistic thing to do, for me.

2 years later – Princes St Gardens.
I’ve started studying animation at the Edinburgh College of Art & I’m sitting cross-legged with an A3 sketchbook open with a uni-ball fine liner .05 black pen drawing the Scott Monument. I’m finding the idea of drawing in public quite frightening, as generally I’m a pretty quiet guy. A couple of hours have passed and I’m starting from top to bottom, trying to concentrate as best I can. It’s getting dark, so I pack up and leave unfinished.

Thinking about it a lot, I go back continuously when I can to try and finish this picture I’m becoming very attached to. I sit in the same place, and find drawing increasingly difficult as people seem to want to chat to me quite a lot. Finally I finish it, tallying up the hours in my head to around 13 (partially due to distractions you see). Suddenly, I look up at the monument as a seagull swoops down above me. It passes then suddenly shits on my picture. The disappointment is intense.

At this point I was trying to get over my singular drawing thing, and it was actually a good thing that the shit fell from the sky and landed on this one.

This links to other stuff by the way.

What I realised was that the process was the bit I enjoyed about art, and yeah it was a shame to have a bird shit on it, but I could photoshop it out.

In my last year of ECA we were to make a short film, so with limited experience of doing so I decided I wanted to make a film about me struggling to make a film with a difficult (animated) bird character. This film would allow me to work with a process and use it as its subject matter, but play with it and mould it into something interesting and surprising (hopefully).

The Making of Longbird -
The weird thing was that this film starting screening at festivals and people liked it. It was a surprise, but it became a valuable thing to have to show that I could make animation, write a story, and film some live-action. This time I had something at the end of it though. The bird in the film tried to shit on it, but I wouldn’t let him this time.

Since then I’ve been working making animation, writing and directing as much as possible. I regularly make work with Ainslie Henderson under Whiterobot. Here we make online videos, write and direct things, and do commercial work sometimes together, sometimes individually. Sometimes there are seagulls…
We recently finished our new short film ‘Monkey Love Experiments’ run by Digicult & Hopscotch films as part of the Scottish Shorts scheme
funded by Creative Scotland. It has some upcoming screenings at Ottawa International Animation Festival in September, and Encounters down in Britsol also (with others to follow soon).

Day to day I have a studio where I work at Summerhall in Edinburgh. You’ll see me there kicking about.

I’m glad that bird shit from the sky.

This video was originally posted on Art in Scotland TV, which is a contemporary arts-news site run by the Summerhall TV team.

For more about Will Anderson, read about his winning 9.88 film entry here.

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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.”

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