I Have Seen the Future, and I see bratty teenagers. © Anlanda Digital Studio.

I Have Seen the Future
Whether you want to believe it or not, the children are our future. And that's what Kris Demeanor is afraid of.

While enjoying a game of tennis with his father one sunny afternoon, our narrator, spoken word musician Kris Demeanor, runs afoul of some kids who can think of no better way to spend their own afternoon than harassing Demeanor and his father. Reflecting back on his own misspent youth, he comes to the not-very-uplifting conclusion that teenagers have always been jerks, and will always be jerks, and the best that we can hope for in this world is that our paths won't intersect with theirs very often.

Director Cam Christiansen adapts Demeanor's monologue into an engaging short film. He utilized Cinema 4d, Maya, After Effects, Photoshop and stop-motion to animate the film, and the results are striking.

Christiansen's design work owes a lot to contemporary print advertising, among other sources, and that, along with the cutting-edge soundtrack and bold use of computer imaging and graphics gives the film a very "now" feeling, while tackling the age-old problem of teenage boys being completely insufferable. The subject matter is likely to age much better than the film, in that regard, since teenagers will still be giving us grief 10 years from now, while graphic design will have attempted and abandoned several movements over the course of the next decade. By that time, of course, the kids in this film will be playing tennis with their own fathers and being harassed by the next generation of kids, so it all comes full circle, after all.

Directors Andy and Carolyn London give an animated retort to Andy's high school ex-girlfriend in A Letter to Colleen, a disturbing view of late '80s New York. © London Squared Productions.

A Letter to Colleen
Speaking of teenagers, as much as most of us try, it's impossible to get over those years of our lives. So many formative experiences, good and bad, shape us during that awkward transition from childhood to adulthood. Director Andy London (who co-directed the film with his wife, Carolyn London) tries to get over his lingering teenage angst by writing a letter to his ex-girlfriend, Colleen, several years after his unforgettable 18th birthday party.

The tale of that birthday party was, "a coming of age story, or a loss of innocence story, however you want to look at it," according to London. After receiving a drunken phone call from Colleen, he wrote an illustrated letter in response to her, which he completed over the course of a single day, and published in comic book form the following day. Fifteen years later, Andy and Carolyn London felt that the story warranted revisiting, so they set about adapting it into an animated short.

The animation in A Letter to Colleen is sparse and simple, complementing London's straightforward, plain-language narrative. The original footage for the film was shot in Harlem, Brooklyn, Central Park and Long Island on a Sony Digital Hi-8 camera. The footage was edited in Final Cut Pro, then rotoscoped in Flash with a Wacom tablet. Final compositing was done in After Effects.

It's an unsettling story, and an unsettling film, but it perfectly captures late 1980s/early 1990s New York through the eyes of someone just barely removed from his teenage years.

L'Ondée/Rains is a sweet mediation on life and our relationship with nature. © National Film Board of Canada.

The film opens as a summer day turns dark as a sudden rainstorm sets in. People hide in their apartments, birds seek shelter, and the populace scurries about from place to place as they go about their business and attempt to keep themselves dry in the process. The rain actually brings people together in odd little ways, such as forcing them to share limited space at bus stops and on public transit, or stranding young lovers in stalled automobiles or causing children to stay close to their umbrella-toting mothers. L'Ondée/Rains is a meditation on everyday life and its relationship with nature and the world around it.

Director David Coquard-Dassault, as well as most of the directors this month, uses simple black-and-white imagery to convey a story focusing on regular people going on about their everyday lives. Coquard-Dassault is a gifted artist, and he maintains the delicate balance between the simple and the complex and the abstract, both in terms of artistry and storytelling. Each scene in the film required a subtly different style of rainfall, as the rain had to constantly adapt and progress along with the story. I'm not sure how one determines which raindrops are best suited for rooftops and which should instead be used at bus stops, but Coquard-Dassault managed to figure it all out.

To create his film, Coquard-Dassault used a simple pencil on paper to illustrate his backgrounds. Traditional animation was done on paper, with TV Paint animation software assisting the process. The compositing and visual effects were created utilizing After Effects CS3. The end result is beautiful and poetic, and best viewed safely indoors as a light rain taps against the window.

Andrew Farago is the gallery manager and curator of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum and the creator of the weekly online comic serial The Chronicles of William Bazillion.