Sumo Lake by Greg Holfeld

 
Adelaide Animation Veteran Greg Holfeld has just released his latest film, Sumo Lake, for our viewing pleasure. Sumo Lake was animated by Holfeld over the summer with funding from South Australia’s MRC. Amazingly Greg put the film together over five weeks without the use of linetests and with limited preproduction. On his blog Greg talks about this decision-

“Animation was getting slicker by the day, and I felt more removed from it with the increasing shine of each new pixel.

“Even during the course of a typical “traditional”* animation production, by the time an idea had gone through script, storyboard, design, layout, and timing, actually sitting down and doing the animation can feel somewhat pre-determined and perfunctory. This is a necessity when you have to pre-sell to a lot of vested interests or accommodate a large crew working on individual components of the visuals. No such conditions existed here.”

He told me today that “I really wanted to animate in a free, unrestrained, and unpolished method that was really pleasing to myself, I didn’t want to make a film that just had animation for it’s own sake. I had to set out with a story to tell, rather than just a notion that “this will look kinda cool”, even if that story turned out to be something of a threadbare mash-up.”
You can read a full catalog of Gregs thoughts about the film on his blog here.

Sumo Lake is not only a great film, but an exciting example of stream of consciousness being able to influence a story as its being told. Something that is extremely rare the modern animation we are used to.