tiny inventions.

So, today I went to Tiny Inventions in Brooklyn. Tiny Inventions are Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter. They are a small independant production company who do animations, short films, some illstrations and toys. They both worked at bigger firms before they decided to go indie and start something of their own, and now they have been busy working since August 2007. Ru told me that going indie is all cool and fun, but it means being busy with all kinds of things all the time, and also the government doesn't encourage animators and free-minded artist like they do in Europe. When I told her I wanted to come back here after my graduation and hopefully find some sort of job or internship, she must have thought I was coocoo. She suggested we should switch passports. The kind of stuff they're making is awesome, by the way. Most of it is for kids, but it's made in a very organic way, to look very natural and hand-made and fun. Perhaps 80% of the tiny sets they had built was made from cardboard. It started with food home delivery, which comes in cardboard boxes. Ru said that they had so many of them laying around, so why not use them and make something out of them. From what I could see in the studio, there were buildings, trees, airports, luggage pick-ups, roads, cars and offices, among other things, made out of cardboard. The characters are then made out of fabric, with mouths and eyes and various body parts photographed in millions of angles to create a 3D model out of a 2D original. Apparently it can all be done in AfterEffects. So, damn, I got really inspired by what these two are doing. Have a look at their website and check out the Davy Crockett animation, in particular. They actually made all those charkboard sequences for real in stop-motion.
And by the way, they were very nice people too.