Today, as part of Cartoon Brew’s Student Animation Festival, we’re delighted to present Ballpit by Kyle Mowat of Canada’s Sheridan College. What begins in pure abstraction slowly reveals itself to be an evolutionary tale–albeit an unconventional evolution that blends organic materials with the mechanical. The film could be dissected, but the total effect is what makes it memorable. Ballpit delights the eyes and yields visual suprises at every turn. The riot of color, the patterns of shapes, the rhythms of movement–it is the joyous possibilities of animation distilled into 90 seconds.
Continue reading for comments from the filmmaker Kyle Mowat:
THE IDEA
The idea came out of some sketchbook work of mine. I was doing a lot of explorations of vague organics and eventually they started looking like microscopic systems of a surreal sort. I made drawings and paintings of these things, using a bunch of different mediums and such. I knew I wanted to focus my short on how these things may move, form and interact and I ended up using some loose concepts of natural selection as a framework for that. I distilled it into two “forces”; organic life and more generally geology, things like gradual changes in the environment, natural disasters etc. The ball shapes and the block shapes came to represent the two forces,respectively.
