Animation: Finalist
Johnny Kelly
Royal College of Art

Shelly

Profile
Johnny Kelly was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1980. Having graduated from DIT with a degree in graphic design in 2004, he worked at graphic design offices such as Image Now in Dublin and NB:Studio in London, in addition to pursuing freelance illustration work.  He recently completed a two-year MA in Animation at The Royal College of Art, where he was awarded the Conran Foundation Award by the Provost, Sir Terence Conran. Johnny's work has been published in Creative Review, DesignWeek, and Grafik magazine, screened in Onedotzero and Resfest. He has produced commissioned work for MTV, Spin, and Fallon London.

Communication objective
This is the story of a lobster with a newfound love for music. After accidentally playing a record with his claw, Shelly becomes determined to make music himself. He soon finds out there is only one way to achieve this. My intention was to create a bright colorful world for this sad fable of a lobster losing his life for his love of music.

Tools used
I created over 2000 hand-drawn frames and then used Adobe® Photoshop® scripting and actions functions to more easily assemble them. I had prerecorded Actions of many different tasks so I could just point Photoshop® towards the folder of scans and the Batch function would take care of things from there. Adobe After Effects® let me composite these various layers and give the impression that each frame was entirely drawn — often certain layers are just on a loop. Being able to jump between the two programs was essential in experimentation; I would make changes to a sequence in Photoshop® and switch to After Effects® and update the footage.