Saturdays is a mixed media short film that I had made for an assignment for my first year in my college course in 2024. It was animated using Adobe Photoshop and After Effects and was edited using Premiere Pro and iMovie.
The purpose of the assignment was to make a short film, using a classical piece of music from the 1700s and the 1800s. Me and the people in my class were each assigned a piece and our job was to make a short film based around the piece that we were given. The rules were that there was to be no alcohol abuse, no drug abuse, we could not star in it ourselves, it had to be a silent film, and it had to be exactly five minutes.
There was no rule about there being no animation so I decided to take it into my own hands and lucky for me, the piece of classical music that I was given, was Schubert / Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, D. 485
Early Ideas
Pranks for Watching
The first idea for the story that I had in mind, was about two characters who have been in my personal art archive for nearly six years. It would have highlighted their antics with doing prank phone calls to people from the west coast of the the United States of America who would be complaining on social media about various experiences with restaurant chains like McDonalds, Dominos, the Olive Garden and Papa Johns.
The two animals would call these Americans and pretend to be from a social media department from one of those four companies without even changing their accents, just to mess with their tempers or blatantly insult them based on how ridiculous their complaints would be.
The Americans would have been animated in a similar fashion to the Canadians from South Park where their jaws wouldn’t move and the top of their heads would be dislocated and as the tops would bounce up and down as they would talk and the two characters doing the prank calls wouldn’t have had their mouths moved because of them being domestic animals who were born in a research facility and given an injection straight after they were born which would have made their brains each grow a mouth, giving them the ability to speak through their ears.
They would have written some ideas for insults on a piece of paper on a clipboard and followed some of those ideas, with the Americans reacting in a hysterical way before hanging up the phone and this would have happened four times before the two guys would go to the pub for a few drinks for a “mental health break” and the final shot would be the two of them looking at the moon from a gazebo in the smoking area of the pub as the moon would be yellow orange.
Why I didn’t go with it
The main reason why I didn’t go through with animating it and storyboarding it is because of the piece of classical music that I was given.
I didn’t think that the idea of a west highland terrier and a tabby with grey stripes (two animals that would be considered “cute”) giving a middle finger to anyone from the upper class and the middle class from the west coast of the United States of America would fit the Mozartian influence that made the piece work. If I had a choice of using a song like the instrumental version of Paparazzi or a piece of classical music such as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to add to the irony of the scenario of the prank calls, then I would have gone through with it. But the two challenges were using the piece that I was given and sticking to the run time of being five minutes.
Another reason why I had decided against going through with this idea is because of the silent film rule that I had to follow. With the audience not being allowed to hear what the characters would be saying or what they would even sound like, it didn’t feel like there would be any point to develop it further. Sure it would allow them to fill in the blanks of what could have been exchanged over the fun and they’d probably still laugh at the animation, but there’s only so much of that you can do before an audience loses interest entirely.
Nocturnal
The second idea for the story was going to be about two frogs living in the Fota Island Resort four years after escaping from the wildlife park and living their own accords with no one telling them what to do. Where often on a Saturday night, they would go down to the special restaurant at the resort called “The Cove” and watch some rugby matches and or observe some people get incredibly drunk at weddings that would conveniently happen on a Saturday and look down upon the drunks for being drunk to begin with. An afterthought of the drunks would pop into the red frog’s mind and why they would be drunk to begin with and he’d share his thoughts with the green frog and they’d decide to tape some alcoholics anonymous posters on the walls of the restaurant but do it subtly and then continue watching whatever match would be on the night that they’d do this.
The frogs wouldn’t have spoken a word to each other, and the animation for one of the drunks would have been just to show them sleeping at the bar with an empty glass of scotch in one of their hands (can’t remember which hand).
Why I didn’t go with it
Although I felt that the piece that I was assigned with had fit the setting of the resort more than the prank calls, I faced a problem of trying to work around the “alcohol abuse” rule and trying to get the message across without breaking that rule and because this was a college project that likely wouldn’t have seen the light of day for any employers I decided that I should bend that “alcohol abuse” rule in a less obvious way and have it affect one character and have the other character be someone who stands by him as a supporter.
This didn’t get past the animation stage although I decided to draw the frogs in Photoshop for a laugh.
Storyboarding
I wasn’t too focused on the storyboarding process as I was in the animation process, because I like to work ahead when I have an idea and see what happens with that idea. Whether an employer would like that mindset or not is none of my business.
I had done only one sheet before I had to meet with my lecturer for a brief showcase/pitch of what I had done at that point and I told him that I was stuck in deciding what would happen next but that I had an idea of it representing a level of depression that some people in my generation have when it comes to the predictability of time. He told me that the repetition of some scenes is all that I need to get that point across.
The Narrative Process and the Emotional Process
When I was doing this, the narrative process and the emotional process were intertwined as I was going through a brief phase where I was getting sick of the predictability of me getting drunk on a Saturday night, waking up on the Sunday after with the stereotype of it being a Holy day with Sunday dinner, and then going to college on Monday to start the cycle again.
I decided that in order to bend the “alcohol abuse” rule, I would have to make the narrative feel personal when it came to my experience with alcohol and my personal desire to be “high on life” that I had at the time when I was making this. In order to do that, I would have to demote the Symphony piece to being nothing more than a backdrop that would enhance the visuals of the film.
I think that by doing that, I managed to give a new meaning to the piece.
In my mind, the repetition of the scenes at the house and something different on the walls of the bathroom in the two scenes, added a new meaning to the piece, bringing it above from being influenced by Mozart when it was written and composed in the process. Almost as if it was a piece that would add to the concept of the predictability of time because of its prominence in playing on the radio on RTE lyric FM.
Originally I was going to end the film with the two guys getting into a fight with a furry who would barge into the pub and be incredibly creepy towards the people inside, and would get a smack from the guy with the red hoodie, and the furry would get up and punch him in the stomach, leading to the guy in the green hoodie smashing a bottle over the furry’s head, with everyone in the pub cheering the two on as they’d fight the furry. As the two would walk home they’d look up at the moon in the sky as it would be yellow orange.
The reason why the fight was not put in at the end, was because of it feeling it like it was making life exciting for the guy in the red hoodie by an out of nowhere coincidence and not by his own choice, and that was not a message that I wanted to get across in the film.
I decided that the very thing to plant the seed for what the ending would be, should be Jim Davies’ quote about an imagination because of it counting towards breaking out of a cycle of predictability.
The Animation Process
As I mentioned above, I had used Photoshop and After Effects when animating this film. When it came to the stop motion parts with my hands and the drinks, I had very loosely followed some rules of photography, by avoiding placing the hands and the drinks in the middle of the frame as that would be predictable and predictability is something that annoys me in pictures and media.
My favourite software to use during this process would have been After Effects because of the existence of the “Motion Blur” option in it. It has been a blessing for me in the last two years.
Conclusion
I think what had shaped the production of this short film was my experience in animation and my desire to push myself outside of my comfort zone. If this was my first animation that I had made, then I think I would have been a lot more disorganised with it, and I wouldn’t have been able to look back on it without a level of embarrassment.
Being disorganised would have been my biggest flaw at the end of 2020 as I was always unsure of what I was doing because of me getting predicted grades for my Leaving Cert thanks to the COVID restrictions and battling my problem with panic attacks. My unsureness stemmed from me being afraid of the idea of being an adult and that was because, me and the students in my class were not eased into the idea of being an adult because of the worldwide closure of everything on the 17th of March of that year.
I had overcome that problem in late 2021 when I decided to make some short animations of the two characters in my personal art archive giving the middle finger to the education system for a lot personal reasons that I am not going to go into, and at the end of 2023, I fully understood why I did those short animations when my lecturer told me that secondary school is nothing more than playing a stupid game while university is exposing the underbelly of the game for what it truly is.
The process of making this short film wasn’t my healing process of that time in my life, I had crossed that bridge in 2022. The process here was me being given a set of restrictions and requirements for making a short film, looking at those restrictions and requirements, picking one of the restrictions that I felt that I could bend the most to make something that I can be proud of.
At no point in doing this did I place my sense of self esteem in the process of making this film. If I had done that, then this would have been harder to make.
As an artist, the best thing to say to yourself is, “I’ve made this and I’m happy with it.”. A simple thing to say, yes, but it helps.
Film and Narrative Studies Paul Redmond
(c) 2024