Another day, another animation project. Actually, it’s more like “another few months” as these things take time! And I work on them on and off, not at all consistently. They’re like long-term sketch pads for little doodles, eventually coming together in some way or another. I get an idea and play with it, then another idea comes along and I play with it, and try to string everything together in a way that can be showcased. They’re drawing lessons more than anything.
I treated this one more like a sketchpad than anything else and decided to keep it that way. It all started with this painting at the Tate. It isn’t much to write home about—it’s very dark and murky and kept in an even darker and murkier room—but for some reason it caught my eye and wanted to use it as the basis for an animation project.
I thought the woman in the painting would make for a great animation mostly because her dress covers up nearly all of her body, which would be forgiving enough for animating. After biting off a bit more than I could chew on my last project, I was more non-committal with this one. I kept the rough pencil lines unpolished and the layers uncomplicated so I could focus on just the animation and letting it go where it wanted to go. Sometimes the coloring and cleaning-up lines can take longer than nailing down the actual flow of the animation. Actually, they always take longer.
Cut to my morning routine: swinging through the Waitrose self-checkout queue with whatever I’ve grabbed for breakfast before work, squeezing through the pure concentrated capitalism of fifty self-checkout machines all talking over each other in that insane, disembodied, sub-human voice. I was really struck by the wall of sound one morning and spent the next few days making different recordings of it, holding up my phone and little microphone trying not to look completely out-of-step with all the other 9 to 5ers.
I became obsessed with the different self-checkout voices. I went into deeply weird corners of YouTube to find clearer sound samples. I read about the voice actors who get hired to provide the voices—they remain anonymous because of course. At this point, all I had in terms of the animation was this woman from the painting that I had been playing around with, and now these sound recordings, nothing else. Absolutely no through line, just two things that I had been struck by recently, so I combined them in honestly the most literal, unimaginative way possible: turn the woman into a self-checkout machine! Obviously! And honestly, everything else that happens in the animation is the natural course of events.