This year Sundance presented lots of animated films and technical goodies for the well-heeled animator/filmmaker. Photo by Bob Bayless.

Animation contributed to more than 30 films in this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Besides fully animated short films, a half-dozen documentaries and one feature premiere used animation along with live action to help tell their stories.

Filmmaker Robert Mowen mixed software and the G4 to create Drop, a unique picture poem. Courtesy of Robert Mowen and Sundance.

The experimental film Drop (six min., color, Sony HD Cam) is a poem in pictures created entirely from the imagination of filmmaker Robert Mowen (director/cinematographer/screenwriter/editor/ designer/sound designer). Rather than words, Drop employs expressionistic images, visual connections and metaphors to follow the journey of a raindrop through a complex, yet fragile world. The idea for Drop began six years ago while Mowen was working as a director in television commercials and broadcast design.

Although his background was primarily in film, his work with talented designers versed in the latest computer technologies opened up to him the creative possibilities of merging traditional and virtual filmmaking techniques. Lacking the funds to hire digital artists, Mowen mastered all the sophisticated design and animation software necessary to create his vision. The cutting-edge computer technology enabled him to produce, entirely by himself, an art film with a high-end commercial quality normally accomplished by a visual effects team.

Approximately 80% of Drop was created on a G4 Powerbook using off-the-self animation, graphics and compositing tools, without the use of a post-production facility. The actors were captured on 35mm film against greenscreen while the backgrounds and foregrounds were created using 3D computer applications. Mowen explains, “I didn’t simply record reality. I created every frame of the film completely from my imagination, using an Apple Macintosh Powerbook and a mix of software.”