Silicon Docks (Graham Jones, 2022)

Like so many people, I was extremely taken aback by the recent pandemic. Not just surprised by the spread of the virus itself, but also how poorly the world had prepared. However, my husband Graham was less surprised, almost languid - and seemed to have a special plan for how to deal with being stuck indoors.

“I want to make a film called Silicon Docks,” he announced. “And I want you to animate it for me!”

His suggestion of a creative collaboration was all the more surprising, considering that I had never animated anything before in my life. Granted, I'm an experienced oil painter and have also been creating digital art in recent years - but animation was an entirely different medium, deeply complex, and frankly scary.

Again, Graham was relaxed about it all. He’s typically a live-action writer-director, who has made lots of indie movies but also wrote and directed an animated feature about ten years ago called The Green Marker Scare (Graham Jones, 2012) - in which he used children’s drawings to create a horror film. At the time, his team had used an increasingly popular piece of animation software called Moho and he was broadly familiar with the technical interface. In the decade since, Moho has naturally evolved but retains the same fundamentals and so Graham was able to introduce me to them. Interestingly, he explained that he didn’t want or need me to animate the environment - that would be shot as live-action and then ‘rotoscoped,’ in other words visually manipulated so that it would seem more compatible with the characters I would then animate on top.

**Fig. 2 - Elon Musk in *Silicon Docks*.**

**Fig. 3 - Jeff Bezos in pandemic Ireland.**

This animation of the characters was obviously a huge task, not least because we intended Silicon Docks (Graham Jones, 2022) to be an ensemble movie: the story of 10 American tech moguls stuck in Dublin on a rainy afternoon towards the end of Trump’s presidency (Fig. 1), and struggling to reach consensus on a new EU agreement (Figs. 2 and 3). As these characters were based on real life people, some well-known and others less so, it was critical my templates were recognisable. “These individuals are going to get quite verbal with each other,” Graham explained - engage in lots of bickering, confrontation, and conduct a doomed Dublin pub crawl. Dejected tech rock stars in pandemic Ireland!

He was particularly excited by the elements of magic realism that would be possible because the film would be animated, and explained there were a few fantasy-type moments in the story that he simply wouldn’t have been able to achieve otherwise. At one point Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are forced to urinate in some alleyway - and instead of penises, were going to take rockets out of their pants! This was intended as a phallic visual metaphor for the ego and narcissism inherent in spending billions on reaching nearby lifeless planets, when so many people on this planet are literally fighting for their lives. Elsewhere in the story, we explored the blurring of real life with the virtual online world and were even able to have the characters casually walk in and out of the internet itself. When we glimpse into the past of the female lead character Marissa, played by actress Grace Power, once again animation blurred reality and imagination more seamlessly than live-action ever could. It was a liberating methodology for us both.

Jeff Bezos extols his Federal Income Tax strategy to a dubious Dubliner.

Almost immediately, I discovered that I didn’t really want to do all the character creation within Moho itself. Moho is an incredible vector-based software, which allows great flexibility, and yet I wanted even more precision and detail in my animated characters. I ultimately created every angle and section of each character template in Procreate and subsequently imported that material into Moho. This amalgamation of software was fruitful, and allowed me to enjoy the best of both worlds. It took a considerable amount of time to create our tech leader templates in Procreate, but afterwards we felt quite empowered in the Moho environment.

Graham would present me with a background shot or shots, a fully edited voice scene and often roughly sketch out what positions he wanted his tech rock stars placed in - i.e. what he wanted them to do. I would then create a rudimentary animation. He would then ask for adjustments to literally everything from character movement to design to basically any part of the mise-en-scène. I would make those adjustments, we would discuss the result and make even more amendments. Gradually, in this way, we breathed life into a given scene.

It was particularly interesting to work on the interaction between the animated character templates and rotoscoped backgrounds (Figs. 4-6). Sometimes, a character would have to move out of the way at a certain moment in order not to clash with a real life element in the rotoscoped material - and characters would also frequently look at things or refer to things in the 'real' world. In this sense, we blended our ephemeral tech icons with Dublin and explored the boundaries between real life and a digital one. My favourite such detail was the heron - a bird that appears periodically throughout the movie and is meant to symbolise money. The main point of Silicon Docks was to subject these real life internet pioneers to the same kind of distortion that is commonplace on the internet nowadays - as if the internet itself, or internet culture itself, was slowly devouring them, and this led to a lot of playful ideas and exploratory animation.

The film has ‘dropped’ online quite recently, and been very well received. Some people are saying it will achieve ‘cult’ status which feels very strange! The only cult for us was the cult of getting up every day during those extended lockdowns and focusing on the film so that we wouldn’t go crazy being indoors. Reviewers have compared my animation to that of Terry Gilliam, which leaves me speechless because we never once mentioned that filmmaker as a reference during the production - although I was a huge fan of Monty Python when I was growing up in Communist Poland during the eighties. We particularly like how our story actually takes place inside a YouTube video, with some of the characters slowly becoming aware of this and our film being intentionally designed for the YouTube platform itself.

“This was during lockdown,” Graham pointed out to Geek Ireland in December. “Myself and many artist friends were going a little nuts being trapped indoors, so that kind of sealed the deal. We couldn’t go out and shoot quite as much, so decided to collaborate on a voluntary animated project for the sake of our collective mental health.”

The excellent troupe of actors really helped our process. They all came in, individually, for just one day each back in early 2021. We barely even saw them without masks, but then lived with their voices for the next 18 months. They really were a terrific cast, each guiding us with an excellent characterisation.

Nowadays (and depending on where you live) the pandemic seems to be nearly over and life is returning somewhat to normal - but for me, it will always bring back the memory of those tech bros locked out of the pubs in Dublin.

**Article published: February 24, 2023**

Biography

Kasia Wiśniewska was born in Łódź, Poland in 1977. She is an oil painter, who also creates art digitally. Silicon Docks was her first work with animation.