Director Damian Gascoigne
Script Liana Dognini
Animation Alex Smith
CGI Animator James Kirkham
Visual Effects Paul Duffield
Editor Rod Main
Music Ben Park
Producer Jo Gallagher

A seven-year-old girl’s accidental adventure in a surreal landscape.

A seven-year-old girl escapes the attentions of her over-protective mother and flies off on an accidental adventure through a surreal landscape.

A series of intercut visual postcards, snapshots of ordinary family situations. Caring, anxious but distracted parents are teaching their children to be safe. However they are in a battle with fate to avoid disasters – and dry-cleaning bills.

A story about a seven-year old girl sent on a mission to post a letter by her over-protective mother. Accidentally forced off course, the girl finds herself in a surreal landscape, full of forbidding suspended objects. She explores this strange world for herself until her mother’s anxiety stirs the landscape into dangerous life. Careful combines rough, immediate drawings in digital space, creating a visual interplay between what is flat and what is not.

Careful is made from a combination of hand-drawn animation, 3D computer-generated animation and treated live action. The aim was to create a sense of a three-dimensional environment using line-drawn elements and to develop a look for the film that pushed the boundaries of design in computer animation. The various ingredients were coloured in Photoshop and then composited in After Effects.

Director Damian Gascoigne
Script Liana Dognini
Boy on screen Munro Gascoigne
Girl on screen Natasha Gascoigne
Camera Assistants Chris Strong & Hannah Truran
Animation Kristian Andrews, Philippa Leathers & Alex Smith
CGI Animator James Kirkham
Visual Effects Paul Duffield & Cristina Seresini
Compositors Sam Atkin & Ian Sargent
Editor Rod Main
Music Ben Park
Sound Designer Tom Russell
Producer Jo Gallagher
Production Company Picasso Pictures

Careful is an attempt to wrestle with the seductive charms of the digital world and protect and push on the idea that drawing is king, no matter what technology promises.

3D computer animation offers amazing possibilities, especially in relation to movement through space, which have until recently been beyond the fingertips of the drawn animator. However, this Pandora’s box comes with its own brand-new set of problems. In particular, computer animated movement tends to deliver an over-co-ordinated, smoothed-out visual language. Once objects and ground are linked they tend to form a very severely locked-together sense of space. This becomes both ugly and boring -the trick is seen and the game is up. Another problem is that computers are by nature ‘anti dirt‘. Most of the accidental components that make drawing and movement exciting – dirty mistakes, smudges, glitches, scratches and ‘wrongness’ – are not going to be found in a software package.

To counteract these tendencies I decided I needed to push against the working process that one is nudged into in working with 3D animation. I did this in a number of ways, working closely with a gifted computer animator, James Kirkham, whose own aesthetic and ‘eye’ I trusted completely.

Firstly I questioned the way in which the 3D-line work objects are constructed, by putting together deliberately mismatching surfaces of objects, so that the final piece looked liked badly made flat-pack furniture. This betrayed its origins as a series of drawings.

Secondly I left in all the rough by-products of my ink drawings: spatters and blobs, inconsistent line weights, accidental transfers from page to page. The exciting thing for me was that these elements began to exist in the space as well as the main objects, trailing around on their own strange orbits, as chairs and turntables twisted and turned.

Thirdly I decided to disconnect the objects from their ground and background, because somehow every time we connected them together to a camera, the whole thing just ended up looking like an arty computer game. To do this we separated layers of line work and set them on slightly offset paths and then created faked backgrounds that did not follow the same camera path at all, but moved in independent but sympathetic directions.

Fourthly I decided to leave some objects as 2D drawings and others as full 3D objects. Placing them in the same space we allowed the nature of drawing as suggestion of form to remain close to the surface.

The thinking underpinning these decisions came from a belief that the pursuit of ‘reality’ that dominates current thinking in 3D computer animation is a misguided and limited path. We don’t need to worry about how things really look. We can see them perfectly well. It is our job as artists to imagine them again.