In need of a shave: Johnny Kelly

Dublin-native Johnny Kelly may garner acclaim for the widely inventive, mixed-media worlds he creates in his short films Procrastination and The Seed, the later a project commissioned by Adobe. But when he began his career, the canvas on which the 28-year-old worked – annual report covers and company logos – didn’t seem that exciting. So when the Dublin Institute of Technology School of Art, Design & Printing grad found that he was illustrating complex, story-driven images on those covers, he decided that there might be a better outlet for his creative drive and enrolled in a Master’s course in animation at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA).

His graduation short film Procrastination has since earned Kelly accolades, including the Jerwood Moving Image Prize ’08, but the idea actually came from a bout of insecurity. “RCA is well known for fine artists and a lot of famous British artists have gone through there. So I kind of felt this pressure to create something really profound,” says Kelly. “I spent four months going around in circles. I was given a book on procrastination and one of the first things it said was to write down all of the ways in which you procrastinate. I wrote this list, which was three pages, and there was enough there to get going on some short films.” The film was initially meant to be a series of 24 mini-films, but Kelly decided that it worked better as one film showcasing multiple animation techniques. While the same mixed-media animation style is seen in the commissioned piece he completed for Adobe The Seed via Goody, Silverstein and Partners, Kelly says that it isn’t indicative of a distinctive style; mixed-media was just something he explored with these two projects.

When Kelly stumbled upon the idea for Procrastination, it put another idea that he had for his graduation project on hold: a film about a series of found recordings that his dad made in the ’60s. “It’s pretty rich source material – these interviews from Christmas 1960 in Northern Ireland,” explains Kelly. “He’s got a microphone and a reel-to-reel tape recorder and he’s talking to everyone in the family, talking about the new Charlie Chaplin film and all this stuff.” Kelly says that the project isn’t shelved entirely and that he’d like to revisit it.

The animator’s sketchbook is never far away when he approaches a project. “In the research stage, I’ll go through a dozen pages in my sketch book before feeling like I’ve made a start,” he says. “It’s something that I picked up from my graphic design background. Everything has to have some sort of functionality or reason to it to be in the piece.”

Nexus Productions