Smith & Foulkes

If nothing else, this year’s Oscars were a testament to the fact that although technology has developed to an extraordinary, sometimes unnerving extent, nothing beats a great yarn. While Brad Pitt and David Fincher watched impassively, their technical masterpiece The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was trounced by an old-fashioned love story, Slumdog Millionaire. Relatively unknown in that same Oscars crowd were Smith & Foulkes, (aka Allan Smith and Adam Foulkes, pictured L-R) whose short This Way Up, a blackly comic tale of two undertakers on a misfortune-ridden trip to a cemetery, was vying for the animated short film award on the biggest stage, and whose ethos echoes that tussle between style and substance in the commercial animation world.

This Way Up, with its deceptively simple animation, but delicately nuanced performances and engrossing comic story, epitomizes the pair’s mentality of technique at the service of story: “We just wanted to get into the characters faces, so we made them sophisticated and made the backgrounds much more washed so we could concentrate on their expressions,” explains Foulkes over the phone from London. “It wasn’t about visually showing off, which you usually have to do on a commercial, it was much more about taking a step back. We wanted to use the backgrounds as a suggestive wash.”

In a year of bombastic animated commercials that subtlety has seen the pair helm a wide spectrum of work, eclectic worlds within which storytelling and engaging characters are front and centre. How do they choose a technique? “With a pin and a blindfold,” jokes Foulkes, before adding: “Whatever feels right for the project. We’ve never really had our own style, so with commercials we love using different styles.”

That’s seen them hark back to first-generation isometric cyber worlds for Comcast (“Anthem”), a poignantly subtle story of a boy hit by a car for Department For Transport (“The Boy Who Didn’t Stop, Look and Listen”) and a brace of spots for Coca-Cola – a lavish, overblown and technically eye-popping theatrical piece, “Unity”, starring basketball superstars Yao Ming and LeBron James and the slyly comic live-action/animation comment on our obsession with cyberspace, “Avatars”.

Both “Avatars” and “Anthem” saw them put their live-action skills to use, something they say they relish and that their directing style in animation owes a great deal to. “The good animators who we’ve worked with in the past, they’re really our actors,” says Smith. “We have quite a detailed talk through what we’re trying to achieve, much like we would do with a performer. We do spend a hell of a lot of time, our main resources, getting those, actually. Some of the scenes in Coca-Cola ‘Avatars’ were animated 100 times to get a walk in the right way.”

“We’ve never really done just pure motion graphics,” asserts Smith. “If there’s no opportunity to have characters doing stuff or a connection to them, some emotion or some sort of charm, [we’re not interested.]”

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