Fame by frame

Animator Darcy Prendergast breathes life into the screen characters he makes from clay. He tells Priyanka Sharma about his art.

Ushered into a small room at the Sri Sathya Sai International Centre in Delhi with three other journalists, I find myself cramped for space to interview Darcy Prendergast, the 26-year-old Australian animator. Before we begin, an energetic Prendergast declares his love for Indian food, especially paani puri. “I have been stuffing my mouth ever since I got here,” he announces. In casual attire and sporting shoulder-length hair braids, he has just spoken before an audience of 200 film students, some of them older than he is.

On this first visit to India, organised by Reliance Animation’s BIG AIMS (Animation, Infotainment & Media School) and the Australian High Commission, Prendergast has visited Mumbai, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Agra, before this stop in the capital.

Prendergast is obsessed with clay animation, or Claymation — stop-motion animation in which the figures are made of clay or Plasticine and are moved very slightly for every frame of a film. Played at high speed, the frame-by-frame changes add up to fluid motion. Learning began early: he used to entertain classmates with clay body parts.

Storytelling with plasticine is more interesting, he says. “Unlike in 3D animation, you can literally leave your mark on clay art. Your personality reflects in your characters.” In India, Claymation — the term is a registered trademark in the USA — is piquing interest. It was seen in Dhimant Vyas’s Taare Zameen Par title animation.

Prendergast’s love for clay began at the age of 10 when his father, a zookeeper, gave him the “sex talk”, demonstrating with plasticine private parts. “It was then that I found my calling in life,” he says, tongue-in-cheek.

His first Claymation film, Ron the Zookeeper, inspired by his father’s experiences and shot in a garage, was showcased at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France. Carrying a message of wildlife conservation and filled with sexual innuendo, the film shows a zookeeper’s desperate yet comic attempts to prolong the race of Sushi, the last male grey panda on Earth. Some of these attempts involve panda pornography. The film received extreme audience reactions. One outraged viewer nearly got into a tussle with Prendergast. Another began to cheer in the middle of a screening.

Working for a production house on the feature film Mary and Max, Prendergast found the deadlines and budget restrictions stifling to his creativity. Until a conversation over several pints with David Silverman, animator of The Simpsons, led to an “epiphany”.

“I wanted to be in control of what I create,” Prendergast says. Soon after, he started his own studio, called Oh Yeah Wow, with a team of ten.

Building a cost-effective studio for Claymation was not easy. “Unlike 3D animation, where you can build an entire city from a computer,” he says, “you need space for Claymation. To build a room, you need a room.” Yet it gave him the space to experiment. When he was approached by Australian band All India Radio to create their video Lucky, he introduced a stop-motion technique of light animation. “Using my own body as a unit of measurement, I drew with a torch,” he explains.

The animator is currently working on Nickelodeon’s kid series, The Critter Litter. “I just can’t sit still,” he says. Undaunted by warnings of Delhi belly and eager to begin his tour of the capital, one can tell that he means it.