Alan Resnick animates the adventures of his odd little character Johnny Bubble

Visual artist and director Alan Resnick has created a series of bizarre animated shorts for online video platform Super Deluxe. Based in Baltimore, Alan has created the fictional character Johnny Bubble after Super Deluxe reached out for animation ideas. “He has lived a long and happy life with a beautiful family and has strong ties to the community,” says Alan. “I don’t know where the idea came from. The inspiration was more visual than narrative. I had ideas for material, colour, movement and tone and the details of the story filled themselves in as I was making it.”

Alan has created five short animations at about 15 seconds long and the process started with the artist drawing free-form comics. “Originally they were going to be 2D animations and look like my drawings, but at some point I realised it made more sense to work in 3D animation where I’m more familiar,” says Alan.

“It was a process of taking those comics and translating them to sculptures, materials, textures and movement. The colour, lighting and realistic rendering was important. I also got to use music from Baltimore artist Andrew Bertsein, and that really set the right tone.”

The shorts are superbly detailed with a pristine yet surreal finish lacing each frame. We see Johnny Bubble being mischievous with yellow objects, being confronted by his new “friends” and running without a care in the world. In each vignette Alan wants to convey “an experience or multiple experiences” by illustrating swoops of emotion in mere seconds. The video shows the animations together in one loop and Alan likes how it “changes the context of the narrative” by seeing them all together.