Animator and director Sam Gainsborough on how to seamlessly blend the analogue and digital

Animator and director Sam Gainsborough has made a name for himself in the industry for the way he seamlessly blends analogue and digital techniques to tell engaging stories. It’s a painstaking yet highly impressive vision achieved in the London-based creative’s latest short, Facing It, the primary subject of Sam’s talk at September’s Nicer Tuesdays. A multi-award-winning film, Sam discussed the various processes that went into making the film: claymation, pixelation, not to mention live-action. The result is a visceral portrait of internal struggle, expressed with originality in the hand-rendered indentations etched into the protagonist’s emotive facial expressions.

Describing how he became an animation director as he kicked off the talk, Sam then took us through the laborious processes that went into Facing It. Copious amounts of testing and trialling went into nailing the expression of the characters and Sam took us through behind the scenes glimpses of realising this. Eventually, he landed on the apt technique that would communicate the protagonist’s inner struggle, a technique that would set apart the seven and a half minute short from its contemporaries. Find out more about Sam’s process by watching this thoroughly informative Nicer Tuesdays talk.