Sep 4, 2013

The Wolf Within" Alex Horan

The Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival was made possible by sponsor JibJab and its strong support of up-and-coming filmmakers.

Alex Horan's "The Wolf Within" grabs the viewer with its opening line: "Rattlesnakes, tornadoes, and my father." Throughout its nine-and-a-half-minute length, the short film hits every emotional beat, displaying a maturity and ambition unusual for a student director.

Horan's film, the seventh to debut at this year's Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival, was produced at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The film is both a period piece and a family history, based on the relationship between Horan's father and grandfather (the grandfather never met the director). Without revealing the story, Horan uses literary references to Jack London's novel "The Call of the Wild" to provide an engaging narrative framework as well as an entry point for the audience into the world of cinema.

Horan offers the perfect package. Carefully considered cinematic composition and camera movement, a lush, never-before-seen black-and-white palette, evocative sound design, and understated but very clever animation that matches the tone of the story, give resonance and poignancy to the father-son relationship depicted in "Wolf Within. It is this attention to detail that gives the relationship between father and son in Wolf Within its resonance and poignancy.

Continue reading comments from filmmaker Alex Horan-

I tend to lean toward humor in most of my films. I used comedy as a crutch, afraid to challenge myself as a storyteller and animator. For my degree project, I wanted to make a film that would allow the audience to connect and empathize with the characters in a way that would make them feel something deeper than laughter. In order to make a film that was meaningful to the audience, I knew I had to first make a film that was meaningful to me. Turning to the people closest to me in my life, it was my father who stood at the forefront. As I was growing up, my father told me parables from his youth that shaped his character and, in turn, mine. My decision to explore my father's relationship with my grandfather gave me the material I needed to create a compelling narrative. More importantly, I was to learn a great deal about myself and about my father's relationship with a man I never knew. [The background was done in Photoshop, the frame-by-frame animation in Flash, the compositing in After Effects, and the editing in Premiere. I love Foley, so I tried to do as much as possible and only downloaded sounds when completely necessary. My favorite part was using Post-Its for the moth wings. At first I wanted to use my father for the narration, but I quickly discovered that he is a doctor and not a voice actor. Luckily, I was able to use a casting site to recruit a really talented man from California, which was a great lesson in mentoring someone over the phone.

Over the past year I really struggled with the narrative structure of the film. Initially, I had a rough animation with a rough outline, but nothing concrete. I wanted the story to carry the same weight for the audience as it did for my father, but I found it difficult to find a way to do this narratively. How much narration is too much, when is not enough, or should there be none at all ...... I felt it was a fine line between spoon-feeding the audience or leaving them completely unsure. Unfortunately, due to deadlines, I had to start animating right away. A couple of times a week I met with my God-like teacher, Tammy Dudman, to workshop my story. During these meetings we explored the relationship between my father and grandfather. Here I finally realized that I had to worry less about the audience and more about myself and the film I wanted to make. No matter how tight or loose the narrative structure is, it is the audience who ultimately decides how to interpret the film.

Kazuo Koike's "The Lone Wolf and the Cub" was a great inspiration to me, as was Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". Miyamoto Musashi's "The Book of Five Rings" also naturally played a major role in the filmmaking process. AlHoran.com, a film by Daniel Sousa TUMBLR: Phantomlobster.tumblr.com