Director's Works
J Hus, Alien Girl Liam O'Connor, Picnic Studio
Picnic is a multidisciplinary studio founded by Mina Song and Liam O'Connor. Writer/producer/directors with a passion for mixing east and west animation styles into flights of fantasy & humour. Their specialty is character focused animation for originals & advertising and with both having film backgrounds, they also integrate hybrid live action and visual fx. Founded in 2013, their work has also ventured into VR, live visuals, title sequences and graphic novels. Their BBC films on Children's mental health won a National Television award and their launch film for Hopster picked up a Kidscreen award for best short film. Recent work includes projects for BEATS, DAFT PUNK with Warren Fu, LEGO, COINBASE, WeTransfer and The End of the F***ing World with 4Creative.
The film follows two stories which the audience can choose between that show characters exploring opposing fantasy worlds, one 'Beautiful' and the other 'Brutal', a visual interpretation of Hus' latest album, Beautiful and Brutal Yard. The unique story-telling highlights Picnic's sleek 2D animation style and brings life to the afro-beat inspired track, giving the viewer the option to switch between each characters’ journey, of a sexually repressed boy in a world of anxiety and brutalist visions, or a sexually free alien girl in a mirror world of positive pleasure, whose paths eventually merge. The Brief was Beautiful/Brutal. Themes of duality currently run through all of J Hus's output. For ALIEN GIRL off the album Beautiful and Brutal Yard (B.A.B.Y), he and the label wanted to create an animated music video that had two identities. The original suggestion was to have either a different colour palette or grade to the same performance. We listened to the song and absorbed the lyrics - playful innuendos about sex and sci-fi - and it spawned a whole concept of two videos in two worlds playing out in the exact same time and composition but with two differing ends of the sexual anxiety spectrum. A Boy wandering through a world of brutalist art and architecture representing all his sexual frustration, and on the flip side, a girl navigating a world of sexual and body positivity and exploration. They sense each other, walk through their world and then meeting, spawn a new world into which they both escape. We were inspired by the separate art departments used on ALIEN (1979) where Ron Cobb and HR Giger answered their briefs without seeing each other's work until way into production. We did a similar thing with separate artists working to a basic board before combining the two concepts. After completion, a website was created by PSSSSD where both videos would play simultaneously, allowing viewers to switch between them throughout. The amount of each is recorded and at the end of the experience you are told which character you lean toward more.