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Filmmaker Mark Osborne doesn’t see himself as the Disney type.
In fact, his stop-motion short film More was inspired by his fear of working there.
With a new baby daughter to support, “I had this fear that I was going to have to get a staff job at Disney,” he said. “More actually was a reaction to that kind of fear.”
More, which tells the story of a miserable factory worker who manufactures “Happy Product,” provides a searing critique of capitalism and conformity.
Osborne created More as a “last-ditch effort to stay independent,” he said.
“If I took some staff job, 20 years down the line I would be still trying to finish a project that maybe I had been doing for years. I felt like I’d be so embittered at that point that the project would be tainted by having to work in this corporate world.”
Two years ago, More won the Audience Choice Award at Resfest, a digital film festival. More also won the Special Jury Prize for short films at Sundance and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short, among other honors.
Osborne’s new animated music video, Keen Yellow Planet, is his latest contribution to Resfest. The touring festival makes its next stop in Chicago on Thursday.
In Keen Yellow Planet, a boy dreams he is visited by a wondrous singing yellow creature. However, when he goes to visit the creature’s planet he finds that appearances can be deceiving.
He sees the creature sing before thousands of people in a giant stadium, but it is not the same as how he remembered it.
“Keen Yellow Planet to me is about this little kid who’s dreaming of going to a Disneyland,” he said. “Dreaming of this ultimate experience, and his little life has led up to this experience, and he can’t even sleep.
“But he goes, and it’s this big giant lame robot that’s all rusty. His fantasy and his imagination of it is much more grand … it’s that moment, that loss of innocence,” Osborne said.
Like many films in Resfest, Keen Yellow Planet‘s high-quality visuals don’t betray its low-budget production techniques. It was made for only $7,500, using hand-drawn cell animation that was scanned into Photoshop. It was composited and animated in After Effects on a Macintosh G4.
Osborne’s film More also explores the loss of childhood innocence in a cynical world.
The film opens with a scene of carefree children on a merry-go-round, laughing with joy. The sweet haunting strains of New Order’s “Elegia” play in the background.
Suddenly, an alarm clock rings. A man awakens from his dream to find himself alone in his gray apartment.
He rides a bus through a soot-colored cityscape to his dismal factory job, where he manufactures “Happy Product” by welding smiley faces onto mechanical gray devices.
When he returns home in the evening, he works on an invention that allows people to see the world as it could be –- an idyllic world in glowing color. However, he ultimately sells out his dreams by commercializing his invention.
Osborne said he created the poignant film as a cautionary tale about the dangers of so-called success.
“I think I knew when I was making More — OK, this is an attempt to get to the next level. I’m going to try to get into Sundance and I’m going to try to do all these things. So it was a cautionary tale for me too, at that point, saying I want to take this next step but I want to make sure I’m doing it for the right reasons and I’m doing it carefully.”
His next film after More was the independent feature film Dropping Out, which he made in 1999. It is a live-action comedy that satirizes both Hollywood and the independent film industry.
“I wanted to make my feature as an independent because I didn’t know how working with a studio would be. How do you create art when you have 10 bosses?” he said.
This summer he re-cut More to make a music video for Kenna’s Hell Bent — a decision that created some anxiety.
“I had a really big struggle with that because I felt like, for anybody who knows the film, they’re going to see this music video and think this totally goes against More‘s message. I had a really hard time because it was like, is this wrong in the long run?”
He found a compromise by including More‘s logo in Hell Bent‘s ending images. “I feel like that’s enough of a link that it will keep the original alive,” he said.
Resfest provides a good community for independent filmmakers, Osborne said. He has been a fan of the festival since it began five years ago.
“I’m thrilled that the festival is as big as it is now, and is as far-reaching as it is now,” he said. “I think what they’re doing and what they’re choosing to showcase is really amazing. I think it’s the kind of stuff that needs more exposure. It needs more dialogue, too.”
