@ConorKehelly - @Aalasteir (Q) - Index

Q: How would you describe your personality?

Dry. But I like to find the humour in everything. People have said I am pessimistic at times but I think I am an optimist at heart. I just like having a laugh really.

Q: What is animation?

A magic trick that somehow turned into an artistic medium

Q: How would you say having unrestricted Internet access has impacted you, and has it helped with your interest in animation?

Yes. I think without the internet, I would never have got into animatiton and developed such esoteric and niche interests. I think the internet forces you to take in every world view from every type of person imaginable. I used to watch really innapropriate things during the wild west of the internet, but I think exposure to these things gives you more time to compute it. Some people end up just getting an overabundance of information shot into their brains in ttheir 20's when they suddenly start partaking in internet culture and it feels like when a caveman gets thawed out of ice in the future and goes insane due to seeing flying cars. I never saw animation as a childrens medium due to sitting on newgrounds when I was young so I think I understood that animations had the power to deliver a wide range of ideas if the viewer was open to it.

Q: What were some of the Flash animations that inspired you, and why do you think they resonated with you?

David firth is an obvious answer. His influence over animation is really under-rated. The madness-combat series is also mind-blowing. I still don't think an animation has managed to match it's kenetic energy. I remember the brakenwood series also feeling like prestiege at the time, as if flash animation could also be sensitive and thoughtful as well as crude and counter-culture.

Q: Where did you learn to animate and how?

Cracked version of adobe-flash cs6 and I think the only tutorial I ever watched was the OneyNG one hahah, I later went to university and studied animation, but I feel like I learnt more from the internet.

Q: How did you create your animation THE FINAL NAIL IN THE COFFIN? What was the pipeline for the project, and where did the story come from?

It feels very immersive, emotional, and personal. How did you decide on using this texture and making it black and white?

I am only one person so I needed to strip everything back to it's bare essentials in order to finish it. I tried to keep to a boring old script>storyboard>keyframes>cleanup but somewhere along the line I just ended up improving and redoing stuff as I saw fit. I had no monetary backing so I could just take my time and do what I want until I was happy with it. I think the core to a good short is the idea and story. Nothing needs to be animated that does not further the idea. This resulted in a kind of brutalist striped back design. I love the textures of old 1940s found-footage type animations where the film is scratched and blurry, as if found from a dumpster. I thought that style might reflect the ugliness of the characters a bit more.

Q: How long did it take to create your THE FINAL NAIL IN THE COFFIN?

I work a full time job so I justt worked on it most evenings for an hour or two, and over weekends. This was over the span of just over two years. It felt long. Too long at times.

Q: What is your advice on creating an animated short film from start to finish? What do you think are the misconceptions around creating short films?

Just start. Don't get in your head about not having a voiceover or you are not good at drawing. If the idea is good, people will be engaged. Do the voiceover and music yourself. Nobody is stopping you. Don't talk yourself out of it. Stick to an idea and make it even if people won' like it. There is someone else out there who thinks just like you and will connect with it.

Q: How did you come to play the upright double bass throughout your childhood, and how did you receive classical training in orchestras until you were 18?

I just saw the biggest insttrument and decided I wanted to play it. For a long time, I thought my career would be in music so I slowly worked my way up to the highest orchestra I could in my age range, but then as i reached adulthood, I realised I never really enjoyedi it like I enjoyed art. Luckily it has come full circle and my musical knowledge has come in handy when scoring my short films. I can just do the majority of it myself. That saves some resources.

Q: What songs and bands do you like, and which genres do you gravitate towards?

Big fan of really hard electtronic dance music. Happy hardcore. Hardstyle. Dariacore. Breakcore and the likes. I find it easy to listen to really loud noisy music when concenttratting. Probably something to do with the rhythm keeping me on track. I also liike ambient too. People like the haxan cloak, Ian William Craig, Phillip Glass, Burial. They can pull a lot of emotion from the bare minimum.

Q: You love electronic music and enjoy getting granular about sound design. Which DAW and VSTs do you use?

Ableon all the way. My favourite VST's at the moment is cycles by slate & ash. It turns any sample into something giant and vast. I am also a big fan of pigments. It can create almost any sound in the world and is pretty cheap.

Q: What is it like being on Instagram? What do you like about it, and what is the culture like?

It is a means to an end. It takes a long time to build up an audience there but it is easy to chat to other like-minded artists in a really simple format, so it isn't all bad.

Q: What is it like being Irish and currently working in London?

Expensive.

Q: You made a webcomic as a teenager on Facebook called Humans of Microsoft Paint. How did that come about, and how would you describe the experience? What did you learn from it? And has it helped in cultivating your style?

It was a riff on humans of newyork, but with crazy absurdist humour. My brotther and i worked on it when we were only teenagers but we both love just distilling really odd characters into one senttence. I don't think our humour has changed much. We wanted o continue it but facebook's algorithm nuked it and we never got the ball rolling again. i guess the thing to learn there is that nothing on the internet lasts forever.

Q: How do you recognize an animation that you like, and what are the elements that you personally find appealing? Why do you think these elements resonate with you?

I think if an animation feels authentic and from a genuine place then I will pick up on it. it should be based on what you personally like rather than what you think the audience wants to see.

Q: What have you learned about yourself from watching animations, and what are animations that you like and would recommend people check out?

Favourite animation of all time is Cat Soup by Tatsuo Sato. Anything by Maasaki Yuasa is brilliant too. (space dandy especially). Anytthing by Don Herttzfeld and David Firth. They have never missed.