#i am testing out clip studio paint for animatic.

[swisscgny]

MEET ANIMATION ARTIST MICHAELA MÜLLER

Michaela Müller is a Swiss animation artist who has won critical acclaim for her thought-provoking animation films. Her award-winning eight-minute film Miramare (2009), which premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, has been shown at more than one hundred festivals, and won eighteen awards including the Swiss Film Prize for Animation. Her second animated short film Airport premiered in 2017 at Animafest Zagreb and was awarded Best Swiss Animation at Fantoche 2017, Best Sound at Ottawa Animation Festival 2017, won the Silver Hugo Award for Best Animation at Chicago International Film Festival as well as the Swiss Film Prize for Animation. Over the course of the past year, Michaela Müller and animation artist Anna Samo created the music video Real Human Being with American songwriter Ryan Martin, which premiered this year on July 1 on American Songwriter. Real Human Being tells the story of a lonely person who is able to brighten the world around him through the music in his heart. Straddling the fine line between despair and hope, the video’s narrative resonates with all who have experienced the city during quarantine and beyond. We caught up with Michaela Müller to find out more about the process of making the video, her award-winning films, and what she will do with her newly acquired coding skills. 

How did the music video “Real Human Being” come about?

A few years ago, the animation artist Anna Samo and I met at an animation festival, and wanted to work together ever since. When Lucas Van Lenten from High Moon Records contacted me about a year ago, inquiring about a paint on glass animation for a music video, I sensed the perfect opportunity to collaborate with Anna. She is a fantastic animation artist, and luckily, she was available at the time to work on this project. Songwriter Ryan Martin and the people from High Moon Records welcomed our sketches and ideas, and also incorporated their own. After a few months of brainstorming, we finally all agreed on the storyline.

Watch the video clip to “Real Human Beings” here:

How did you decide on the storyline for the music video? Was it created in New York during quarantine?

We took the energy and the mood of the song as our lead in the process of finding a visual expression for the music. It is the story of a lonely person, wandering through the city with an ever more heavy heart. Starting in a rainy and dark place, the character manages to find a way to brighten up the town's mood by creating music with his heart, finding new hope. It was, of course, most important for us that Ryan agreed with this main idea. Luckily, he was very open to our images and liked what we came up with.

In the summer of 2019, when I was in Switzerland and Anna in New York, we started to send snippets of painted animation sketches and images back and forth in a playful way. Each of us added what we liked to have in the film. We also tried to converge our painting styles, looking for transitions to connect the scenes fluidly. That’s how we came up with the storyline and the animatic (an animatic is something like a draft assembly of the film, with sound and layout of the scenes in place, as well as some rough animation). The animation technique is a mixture between paint on glass animation and cut out animation. 

This was the first time I created an animation with someone else, and it was a great experience! Animating is usually a lonely enterprise, demanding patience and persistence in order to create each second of a film. Paint on glass – the animation technique used for this video – requires long hours in a dark room, every frame has to be painted by hand, recorded, wiped away, painted again. We were working in our own little studios, although we were separated, there was the feeling of sharing the same experience. It was great to know that there was someone working on another scene of the same film. This way it took just about a year to finish the video and we learned a lot from each other, sharing the same passion, same love for details and supporting each other along the way.

When quarantine started in New York in March, the video was just about to be finished. We showed it to a select number of people in order to get some feedback, and there we felt that it really hit a note. A musician friend of mine was touched to tears when she saw it for the first time. Quarantine was isolating people in the midst of a city of millions, loneliness and despair were very present.

How do you make your animation videos and what kind of materials do you use?

Before I started animating, I was a painter, so the first animation technique for me to jump into was paint on glass animation.

This technique allows you to control each frame of the film on one layer. There is no background and foreground separation. Everything moves together. When animating, I try to paint what I see while imagining the film. I take a lot of time to figure out the storyline and transitions of the scenes. It takes almost half of the production time to get prepared, to test the animation and to create an animatic. Once everything is ready in my head, I can start painting it.

For the soundscape of my own projects, I was lucky to collaborate with Fa Ventilato, a uniquely talented sound artist. He does not give up until each little sound fits the film, and the rhythm corresponds, even expands the films imagery.

Both of your previous short films, Miramare from 2009 and Airport from 2017, received critical acclaim. Tell us more about these films, what inspired them and how was the process of making them?

Both films are painted on glass and took years to complete. Miramare was my first animated film, and marked the end of my studies in Animation and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Zagreb. It tells the story of two Swiss children on holiday at the Mediterranean coast, camping with their parents. When they cross a fence, they almost come in contact with a refugee, but are too scared and run away. A storm hits the coast, and the tourists rushing home get stuck in an endless line of cars. In this animation I wanted to create a film about the fearful atmosphere at the time around refugee migration to Europe. The film was inspired by news snippets about refugees fleeing to Europe by boat, as well as my own childhood memories of camping holidays on the same coasts. A border where dreams collide.

Watch Miramare here:

Airport explores the borders between the right to freedom of movement and the restrictions national security requirements put on society. It is inspired by my own travels, as well as what airports represent. They are modern entry points from where one can go anywhere in the world, as well as some of the most controlled areas we have. Every action and anomaly can raise suspicion.

Watch Airport here:

What are you working on at the moment and what’s next for you?

After two years of making commissioned films, I am preparing a new project in Switzerland, using a slightly different technique. During the confusing time of the lockdown in New York, I started to learn to code and followed a webinar by the game engine software Unity for seven weeks. It is fascinating how strange - but logical at the same time - code works. I am now looking for further ways to combine hand-made and digital methods of creating animations.

In the past twenty years I have been travelling a lot, mostly between Croatia, Switzerland and New York. I feed on changing places, meeting people as a contrast to animating alone in the studio. Now, things may be changing and I am not sure how this new situation will affect filmmaking. I feel that it is a good thing to fly less, but I still wish to keep up the connections between places.