David O'reilly has become notorious for his approach to visual story telling within the film maker and animation community in recent years. For me personally I became aware of his work when the Adventure Time episode 'A glitch is a glitch' was aired on television. This episode was written, storyboarded, directed, produced and animated entirely by David O'reilly. The shows creator Pendleton Ward had apparently idolised the film makers work since stumbling across it online and in 2010 contacted him about the possibility of collaborating together on a Adventure Time episode. At the time David was far too busy creating his latest film 'The External World' to take onboard the offer from Pendleton and had to decline. However after moving from Ireland to Los Angeles a year later, the two bumped into each other several times and began discussing the possibility of having David work on an episode in the future. Pendelton Ward gave David complete creative freedom over the episodes story and reportedly told him to 'Do HIS own thing'. Despite the fact David O'reilly claims he would of been more than happy to animate one of the shows episodes he was extremely pleased to have creative freedom over the entire episode. Regardless that some segments of the episode had to be removed, censured or edited within the script, the final cut of the episode is still something that David himself describes as 'still something that he's proud of'.
The Adventure time episode involves a computer virus from a 'initial video' infecting the land of ooo. The 'initial video' that fin and jake watch in the episode involves a woman eating her own hair, this video was also released by David O'reilly online a few weeks before the episode aired. Complaints flooded in from worried parents claiming it was 'too extreme for a kid's TV' however David responded to those complaints that children could 'tolerate it'. I do find that particular segment of the episode very unsettling to watch, but it's clearly David O'reilly style to have something like that incorporated into the episode. The film maker also claims he found it difficult to animate his glitchy trademark style mixed with good character animation.
What I love most about the 'A Glitch Is A Glitch' episode has to be what David O'reilly accomplished with the Adventure Time characters when modelling them in Maya. Below are a few character pages depicting the design process of converting the characters from 2D into 3D models...
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| Jake 2D design to 3D model design |
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| Princess Bubblegum 2D design to 3D model design |
Because of adventure times simplistic cartoony visual aesthetic it blended together extremely well with David O'reillys low-poly 3D animation style. Before moving onto the character design level of this project, I'm going to research into simplistic character design examples because I feel focusing on the simple rather then the realistic for this project would be far more effective then anything else.
Many argue that animation is for the 'child audience' rather then seeing it as the art form it rightly deserves. However, David O'reillys interpretation of Adventure time is verging on 'inappropriate' for children; certain scenes being upsetting or unsuitable for children. Low poly computer animation, much like his style may be naturally assumed to be child friendly regardless of content because of the visual athletic of the animation itself. As much as the audiences opinion and assumptions of an animate based on how it looks is a factor to CG limitations, CG in many ways has developed to a far more respected level when it comes to special effects then when approaching a more 'cartoony feel'. Honestly, I do feel like computer animation is near obsessed with recreating reality rather then creating a world of its own; which you could argue is in itself a limitation of the technique.
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