Letter of Intention

Application for the BA in Character Animation at the Animation Workshop, Viborg

I first started animating by turning my mum’s notepads into home-made flipbooks. Since then I have gone on to try many different media: Cut-out, stopmotion, claymation, tv paint, flash, traditional pencil and paper, and also a tiny bit of 3D. My name is  Anna Bonnen. Needless to say, I’m applying for your BA in Character Animation.

It has been an eventful year since I last applied for CA in 2016. I was accepted into the bachelor in Production Design at the Danish Design school and I thought that this might be my entryway into animation. It was a gift, being surrounded by creative people from such a broad range of disciplines and getting inspiration from many different fields outside of animation.

At the age of 16, my curiosity about the world led me to Mexico for a year as an exchange student. It was humbling, learning a new language from scratch to the point of fluency, and experiencing a way of life so different from my own. My experience in Mexico prepared me for working with people from many different cultures and walks of life. This adaptability has carried over into my work as a tutor for middle school children, and as a volunteer at music festivals every year since 2010. Over the years I have taken on many different responsibilities from security guard, to being in charge of a bakery stand to assisting in collecting used up air mattresses covering an area of roughly 800.000 square meters. Last summer I went volunteering with a friend at a self-sustainable farm house in the middle of nowhere in Ireland. I may have the spaghetti arms of a would-be animator but I make up for it in stamina and optimism. This fact has ensured that no matter where I’ve found myself, I’ve always made the most of it and learnt as much as I could from my experiences.

Which brings me to my time in TDA. As a result of my work ethic, I finished high school with a GPA of 11,9, the highest of my year, and received a scholarship which instantly went into the “Anna is going to Drawing School”-foundation.

After a 3 month drawing course at TrueMax academy with Thierry Capezzone as my teacher, I moved to Viborg and started TDA. Little did I know that my life was about to change completely. I loved drawing everyday, loved being part of the school and the community and I became certain that I wanted to attend the school as a character animator one day. After TDA I attended the Media School and held a spot at Open Workshop while working for the school. As you can see, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get to know the school, and I love this place more and more everyday.

After TDA I’ve continued to self-study with the help of sites like New Masters Academy and Schoolism. Seeing my own progress during the past years makes me believe that the best is yet to come for me artistically and serves as a huge motivation when drawing gets hard. Perseverance wins every time!

And speaking of perseverance, when you really want something, you have to give something else up in return. While I really enjoyed the creative environment at the Design School, I quickly realized that set design was not where I wanted to take my devotion. I live for animation and that’s where I want to invest my energy. Juggling the Design school, my self-study in classical drawing and the new portfolio for TAW soon became too much. Around Christmas I made the hard decision to quit the design school to become a full-time self-student. Although I have learned a lot being my own teacher, I really hope to become a part of TAW. Besides my obvious infatuation with the community, I want to be in a school where the focus is mainly on animation, with a hands-on approach to the creative practice and teachers who work professionally with animation outside of school.

My influences are many and varied, but I tend to gravitate towards art that strikes me as loose and flowy. My favourite artists whom I feel master this looseness are Shiyoon Kim, Jamie Hewlett, and artists of the art nouveau movement, my favourite being Gustav Klimt.

Secondly I am very inspired by the use of colour and graphic shapes in the works of Russian tattoo artist Sasha Unisex. It is my dream to one day make a short film, giving life to her animal designs. And I can’t talk about my love for stylized design without mentioning Cartoon Saloon. The style is graphic and simple yet so intricate at the same time, and I really like the stories that come out from that studio. Having heard from the teachers and TAW students who went to work or intern for Cartoon Saloon, I have the impression that it’s also a really nice place to work and I hope I get a chance to work there someday.

My absolute favourite work is the film “American Beauty”. The bittersweet and humorous message of the movie spoke to me on a higher level, instantly making it my all-time favourite. Firstly, I really appreciate that you can sense how all the characters have received love and attention from their creator. They are fully fleshed out characters with fears and desires that you can relate to. Secondly, it amazes me how the movie gets better, the more visually aware I become of the use of color and staging in a story. Lastly, American Beauty has a very important quality that you should never take for granted in any work: It’s funny.

Another favourite work of mine is “Lawrence of Arabia”. There’s a sort of grandeur and epicness to a lot of older movies that I really enjoy and I feel like Lawrence of Arabia is the embodiment of that feeling. I was so fascinated by the story of T. E. Lawrence and his complex character that I simply did not feel time pass.

Lastly I adore the animated film “The Illusionist” by Sylvain Chomet. The movie doesn’t have any dialogue but you always know what’s going on and you relate to the characters instantly. I am a huge sucker for films that do not rely on dialogue to convey the story, and there’s a lot of great examples in animation, like Jan Svankmajer’s “Dimensions of Dialogue”, Sylvain Chomet’s first film the “Triplets from Belleville” or Alê Abreu’s “Boy and the World”. For me, that is animation as its best; the ability to universally tell a story so clearly and true you don’t even need words.

On the other hand I don’t like it when a movie becomes too obvious, as I think “Midnight in Paris” does. I don’t believe in this movie. Not for one second. This movie is filled to the brim with my pet peeve in all storytelling: Having characters overly describe themselves. If your character is a painfully self-aware, nostalgic, awkward writer who feels like a sellout and wishes he’d just stayed in Paris as a young man, then you do not have him say it out loud, unless you want him to come off as even more pretentious than he already is with his shameless name-dropping of modernist artists. The characters, especially the fiancée all act too much like uninterested teenagers to be credible, and don’t get me started on the movement of the characters. Once I start noticing how they all strike the same type of pose before they start speaking, I cannot unsee it. All of the above completely ruins my suspension of disbelief and hinders any emotional connection with the story.  

Another least favourite of mine is Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia”. I know the title probably should have warned me, but I just don’t enjoy it when the point of a story is misery and nothing else. A movie doesn’t have to be happy or bright or teach “valuable life lessons” but if it can’t even make me care what happens in it, why should I watch it? In the end, I am not sad the world is ending, I am relieved because a really unengaging story is finally over.

The problem with the last of my least favourites, “Sausage Party” lies perhaps more with the sad, old-fashioned idea it implies. Animation is only for kids and when it finally is for grown-ups it has to completely over the top in terms of language, graphic violence and sexual content. It’s as if the movie is constantly poking me, asking: “Are you disturbed yet? Are you outraged yet?” which gets dull really quickly. It’s problematic that a movie like Sausage Party can be hailed as “ground-breaking animation for grown-ups” when it mostly feels like a watered-down version of South Park.

Another thing that doesn’t speak in the favour of Sausage Party, are the controversies about how the film was made. No matter if the allegations about artists not getting paid or credited for their work are true for this particular film, I have heard similar stories from friends of mine starting out in the animation business. I realize that I’m going into an industry of passion, where there’s a lot of people willing to work themselves to the bone and just as many people willing to take advantage of that. For someone like me with ambitions for working both in Ireland and France, it’s something to consider, even if the animation industry in Europe is generally more unionized than in the rest of the world. Sometimes in my cockiest moments, I dream of starting my own studio and revolutionizing the economic model of the creative industry, starting in Denmark, and later expanding across the world. But who knows? The future belongs to the new generation. And I hope you will let me be a part of that through TAW. All those years of volunteering haven’t earned me a lot of money but if I would get in I have a big inheritance that I would use to finance the education supplied by SU.

With this I leave you the link to my online portfolio at annamationportfolio.blogspot.dk and hope that you will take an interest in me and my work. If you have any questions feel free to contact me at ms.anna.bonnen@gmail.com

Sincerely,

Anna Bonnen

Software Knowledge:

photoshop (good)

flash (good)

after effects (intermediate)

maya (beginner)

indesign (beginner)