Our friends at Wonky Films have released last year’s festival favourite, Writer’s Block, onto the web, you can check it out below.
A different change of pace for Ace Discovery collaborators, Tom Gran and Martin Woolley as they face time inside for crimes against writing in the short, Writers Block.
As the Spin Kick Bros, Martin and Gran, are often known for their lewd humour and high octane action. In Writers Block, the duo break the forth wall and take us inside a prison for criminally poor writers where we join a gang of cons attempting to escape by changing the narrative to their own lives. Speaking about the high concept short, co-director Tom Gran explained: “We usually build our projects from a genre or setting that we like and we felt like prison movies were an area we liked a lot but hadn’t really explored yet. We thought something about a character trying to escape from the film itself in some way would give us a chance to play around with the narrative structure of the film but still have a fun straight-forward story.”
The animator goes on to descibe how to the characterizations came about and what animation techniques were used: “We actually built photomontage mugshot things of each character while we were trying to design them. Gill was based mostly on Gary Oldman and Bosco was mostly Ian McShane, with chunks of Jack Nicholson and Mel Gibson thrown in.”
“It was animated in Flash and then comped together using After Effects. Our background artist, Adam Davis, worked in Photoshop and Artrage. The bulk of animation took place over about a month, during which I was working with another animator, Todd Setter, but after that I spent a few months doing clean up, colour, adding in all the tattoos and regretting my life choices.” He also comments on the more difficult parts of the animation process: The scene where the floor falls apart. It had to be assembled out of about 50 layers to get the perspective to work and it gave me a thousand headaches”.
As with many Wonky shorts, the company have also released an accompanying
iOS app featuring background developement work, animatics, and now the full film. You can also play related games by creating a Ball Point Penitentiary prisoner I.D ans taking on the word master challenge to prove your innocence in the charges of criminally poor writing.
As with previous Wonky shorts, downloading
the app is a great way to view the film and find out some fascinating behind the scenes process work for avid animation fans. I wish more studios would take this approach to releasing shorts, it may seem costly but having a companion app extends the film’s shelf life in the viewers consciousness, I still have
Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road on my phone from the last Wonky release and play its games often. With that in mind, I’d say the apps more than pay for themselves.
All in all, Writers Block is another solid release from UK’s Wonky Films. I have seen another side to the Spin Kick Bros through it and had some fun with the app. Keep ’em coming guys, you’re doing great!
"There are also other characters that come and go (also owned by the Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate media company)."
Huh. Is that just referring to other characters from the show itself, or is this implying that the new season is going to have cameos from other WBD IPs