5 years ago

Matt Taylor to young animators: Start your own Titmouse!

Chris Keulemans 

 

Yesterday afternoon, Kino Jusuf Gërvalla was full of young animators who wanted to be Matt Taylor. He handled the devotion with boyish American charm. He didn’t act important but simply whizzed us through the life of an animation addict who happened to land a dream job.

Why did everyone want to be him? To get as close as possible to Rick and Morty, the crazy professor and his insecure grandson who have been racing through their wacky, irreverent adventures for three internationally broadcast seasons now – and we’re all waiting for season 4 to start. Taylor has come closer to them than almost anybody outside the show’s creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon (and director Bryan Newton, who will run us through his Rick and Morty experience this afternoon). 

Back in 2017, Taylor was working at Wacom. During his lunchbreak, he got a call from Ben Kalina of production company Titmouse. Would he be interested in directing a Rick and Morty Exquisite Corpse? Before the lunchbreak was over, Taylor had a list of animation artists he wanted to invite. In July, the result went viral: over 10 million views on Youtube and counting.

 

Exquisite Corpse, ‘cadavre exquis’, is a complicated name for an artform that was popular among the French surrealists of the 1920’s. We’ve all played it sooner or later, at school or with friends. It started out with poetry but quickly moved to visual art as well. One person leaves the next a blank piece of paper, with just the last words of his poem or the last lines of her drawing, the next person follows up from there and hands another almost-blank page over the next. 

André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray loved it. So did Andy Warhol and his friends. Grace Jones used it for one of her album covers. And in 2017, the exquisite corpse offered Matt Taylor the opportunity to challenge 22 animation artists, the surrealists of today, to contribute their own 5 to 10 seconds of Rick and Morty.

Taylor showed us the result on the big screen: in rapid succession, the mad professor and his grandson race through every animation style you could imagine, in a dazzling 3.33 minute ride jam-packed with adventure, violence, pop-culture references, raving colors and madness. ‘Adult Swim gave me all the freedom I wanted,’ Taylor told us. ‘I could choose the artists and the music. All the animators were free to work in their own style. The only thing I had to do was to keep the whole thing on track, and to produce the final thing within two months. So I asked all the artists to send me the final frame of their storyboard first, so I could pass that on to the next artist – who could morph that to blend it in with his/her own style. This meant that all 22 were working on their own part at the same time. At first, I tried to prepare some kind of narrative. But when the original Morty drops one of Rick’s chemical concoctions at the very beginning, which happened to contain LSD, I understood that we could do basically whatever. LSD saved the day.’

‘Receiving all those animations was incredible. I would drop the animator’s key into the edit and it all smoothly connected. It was like a Frankenstein moment. As I had decided not to contribute one myself, I could focus completely on directing the process, making myself available to the animators whenever they asked for guidance. In the meantime, I went looking for the right music in the Adult Swim’s library. I chose this instrumental track by Run the Jewels. The saxophone drop in the middle caught my attention. It works perfectly: the music pushes everything, but it doesn’t take away the focus.’

‘In the end, there was just one scene we had to change. Richard Mather put Morty on a bed in chains, wearing just his underwear, surrounded by sexbots on high heels carrying whips. That would have been okay in the tv-series, but this was going to be used as an advertisement – and we had to remember that Morty is still a minor, 15 years old, so this was out of bounds. Mather inserted Scary Terry instead.’

 

At the time, Taylor hadn’t met most of the artists he invited face to face. He hopes one day he will run into them somewhere. ‘That’s why I am so excited to meet Lora d’Addazio here, who worked on Marco Imov’s contribution to the Exquisite Corpse.’ Lora, waving from the crowd, was also the animator of last year’s Anibar trailer, with the 50/50 theme.

Taylor, who has worked for commercial companies in the US since graduating in 2006, is clearly inspired by all the independent work he is seeing at Anibar. ‘I would love to make longer work like that. Could I afford the time? It would take years of my life. It’s a high hill to climb. But being here is really a push forward in that direction.’ 

Could he offer some tips for the young animators from Kosovo? ‘There is obviously so much talent here. But hardly any animation studio’s. So: start your own Titmouse! Remember, they were just a husband and wife when they began, working from home and designing t-shirts. You’ll see: the more you do, the more will follow.’

Matt Taylor bounded off the stage, grinning widely. He was immediately surrounded by young admirers, who wanted to get even closer to Rick and Morty… 

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