Skwigly/SWAN Focus: Rumpus Animation
Starting this month Skwigly, in association with SWAN, the South West Animation Network, will be bringing our readers a monthly focus on prominent/emerging animators, studios and artists based in the South West of England. In our first South West focus we meet Seb Burnett and Joe Wood of Bristol-based Rumpus Animation, whose first interactive animated app The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle was recently given a wider release via the gaming platform Steam. We spoke to Seb and Joe about the history of Bertram and what else the studio have been up to in recent years.
Seb Burnett & Joe Wood
Can you tell us a bit about the history of Bertram and, by extension, Rumpus?
Seb Burnett: I did the MA in animation at Bristol and I made a short film where (Bertram) gets lost on his way to Great Yarmouth. Then after the amazing, non-success of that film, Joe and I started Rumpus together. I’d carried on writing a blog, I think I had a MySpace page for Bertram, things like that. I was carrying on writing these snippets from him, so his personality was developing, but then one day there was an opportunity to pitch a webseries.
Joe Wood: I think we’d done them because BBC online were paying for a few people to make films.
SB: Joe came round and I opened up my big Bertram box of ideas written on scraps of paper, we spent ages going through notes and I could see the fear welling up into his eyes. We wrote four episodes as a little pitch and the BBC Online said no to it.
It kind of kicked around for ages, then I did the Animation Sans Frontieres course where we could choose a project to develop for production. We’d been talking about moving Rumpus into interactive work, like self-publishing apps and books and games as a way of selling our ideas without the need of a big broadcaster. So I pitched this idea that went down okay and just as I was finishing that course the Starter For Ten fund was available in Bristol. I was away at the time but Joe pitched Bertram’s idea to them and we got a little bit of funding to develop it some more, then pitched it to GamesLab, got a bit more funding, that was what gave us the chance to make the game. So quite dull, really. That’s like eight years of Bertram wandering about, lost.JW: It wasn’t a solid eight years, was it? He was lost in the world for a lot of that time.
SB: Dilly-dallying around.
Has keeping the persona of Bertram alive helped with the visibility of the studio?
SB: We’ve kept a separate social media strand for Bertram, so he’s got his own persona. Rumpus shares that but Bertram never shares Rumpus stuff because he’s Victorian, and Rumpus doesn’t exist yet…but since we’ve made Bertram we’ve been featured in The Guide, we’ve been getting a lot more press that leads back to Rumpus, and a few interviews, more job leads have come up because of it, for quite big clients. Possibly Rumpus doing interactive work for them, so yeah it’s been really positive.
Can you describe your working dynamic?
SB: I think we’re gonna have a big argument about it soon, Joe’s much more useful about it than me, I tend to have madcap, hairbrained schemes and then Joe does everything else. When the going gets tough I just lie down and cry, whereas Joe rolls his sleeves up and gets on with it like a true Northerner.
What would you say are the main areas of interest for the studio?
SB: We’re mostly interested in funny characters or funny stories, and whether that’s for a game or an animation or comics it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re enjoying making a funny little thing happen. It’s always the story and characters that are the most interesting. Although funny animation comes first, occasionally we do quite a lot of work where there’s no humour involved whatsoever. (Clients) have seen some of our work and realised technically we can animate but the project will be in a completely different style than what we usually do. Visual language changes, different things become fashionable, new techniques emerge, so you need to keep trying to experiment with different approaches to different films, so you’re not just ‘that’ studio with ‘that’ style. We work with different illustrators as well, we’ve got constant freelancers coming in, it’s quite a flexible way of working but the basis of it all is the humour, basically.
What sort of commercial work have you produced?
SB: We did some web animations for Plenty’s web channel with Juan Sheet, that was quite a fun. We’ve just done some adverts for an American client, little short promos where they let us put in fun characters, and a lot of the time it depends on what the topic is, really.
There was a Cbeebies series, How to be EPIC, we did little animated segments within a big kids’ TV show and that was really good. They obviously had a script but they gave us some free reign with the storyboard and visual gags, and the design was all down to us as well. It needed approval but it was basically we got to design what we wanted to.
You’ve also produced some music videos. Have these been valuable to your studio’s identity?
JW: You can have ideas that you want to make but never get around to, scripts and stuff where you might want voiceover, but with music videos we just make some cool stuff to go over this music, so it’s quite a nice thing to do.
SB: For Count Skylarkin the idea was to keep everything really simple and reuse – that’s the thing with music videos, you can do that with loops, they’re sort of made for re-use. But in the end we started enjoying the fact we could put any character we wanted in there, and it sort of mushroomed a bit. But then it’s become a good calling card, it got into Annecy, Craig Charles really liked the song, that gave quite a boost to the hits on YouTube. It’s probably been one of our most-viewed videos.
JW: Although it took us a while to get it done, he was trying to release it earlier than…we allowed. But he chased us up quite a lot, so he made us finish it, which was good.
SB: For Casio Kids we used it as a chance to experiment, so it’s all cut-out in Flash but then we animated it as if we were stop-motion. I’m still quite proud of that one because it looks quite different, it’s still got similar characters but it looks quite different as a technique to what we’ve normally done, so that was worth it.
Where are you hoping to go from here?
SB: We’ve not had a meteoric rise to fame, that’s the thing I think with Rumpus is that we’re doing alright but making the game’s felt like the most standout, interesting thing, I think. It’s just a case of trying to find joy in the animation and do our own little independent things where we can, just to keep us sane.
Learn more about the work of Rumpus Animation at rumpusanimation.com & preview/purchase The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle via The App Store or Steam.
To find out more about SWAN or to get involved visit swanimationnetwork.co.uk