Animation Nation: Elliot Dear

Not long ago, Elliot Dear was very much a struggling artist. Having just spent his last £300 on making a music video and with no means of income, he was skint. “There was a point when my girlfriend and I were turning up the sofa cushions looking for change to buy food,” he admits.

He’s come a long way since then. Dear’s latest directing job, and only his second-ever commercial campaign, was the most talked-about British ad of 2013. The John Lewis Christmas ad The Bear and the Hare, which he co-directed with Yves Geleyn, had the whole nation dewy eyed.

Its heartstring-tugging populist storytelling was also combined with innovative mixed-media execution. A blend of 2D and 3D elements was achieved by placing laser-cut frames of hand-drawn 2D characters in real sets and shooting them in stop-frame animation. “I always want to make something that makes people wonder what it is they’re seeing,” says Dear. “The technique is not distracting, it’s not the hero. You’re just not really sure what you’re looking at.”

Dear was refining the mixed-media technique used in The Bear and the Hare while creating an earlier piece of work, his sublime 2011 music video for Bubble, by King Creosote and Jon Hopkins. Rotoscoped dogs and fish gambol in a detailed 3D coastal village where reality dissolves and the village and its watery reflection become one. “That was done with miniatures, Flash and After Effects,” he explains. “The houses are little Hornby models people buy to put next to their train sets. And because I’d been working in After Effects for so long, and understanding how lenses work, I knew how to pull those things together.”

Moving pictures about Morris dancing

Dear started making films with friends in his early teens – he was usually put in charge of special effects – before going to study illustration at Bristol UWE, where he took an animation module and taught himself After Effects in his spare time. In 2007, his graduation film led him to being hired as a compositor at ArthurCox, a small animation studio based in Briston. “I winged it,” he claims. “I was promoted from assistant 2D animator to a key animator on a chewing-gum ad. I had to learn very fast to pull it off!”

Over the next three years, he built his first showreel partly by finding low-budget jobs the studio would otherwise turn down. One 20-second test turned into a commission by Music Matters – a legal downloading initiative – to make animated shorts about two music greats, Kate Bush and John Martyn. That precipitated his move to London, firstly to work in-house at Fallon on a Cadbury campaign. Then his reel caught the attention of James Bretton, executive producer at Blinkink, who “called me in for a meeting and ended up throwing me a couple of things, including a no-budget piece about Morris dancing.” That led to Bubble and two more low-budget promos for Jon Hopkins and King Creosote that blended live-action with stop-motion, including Third Swan, in which a real swan destroys a model landscape.

The 2D dog, the bear and the hare

Not long after Dear’s sofa-based low-point in 2011, came the first payoff when he landed a series of spots for British Telecom. Apart from getting paid, it taught him about working with clients and agencies and managing a team. The BT work led to the John Lewis project in early 2013, when Dear was teamed with Geleyn by Blink and their American partners Hornet Inc. to pitch on the store’s Christmas ad.

They were up against some heavy-hitting directors, the pitch itself took weeks – but they came up with their key technical idea very quickly. “At university I had experimented with cutting drawings out and photographing them. I did a film that was a model set, with a 2D dog that I comped into it – I guess Bubble is a bit like that. The second time I met Yves, I grabbed him and we shot the first motion test – I don’t think he had time to take off his backpack.” The ad saw him working with a platoon of ex-Disney animators (including key animator Aaron Blaise, director of Brother Bear), proving that his youth and inexperience has not stopped Dear becoming a first-rate animation director.

He modestly suggests that his apparent ease in mixing animation techniques is partly due to his own limitations as an animator but says his real passion lies elsewhere – with special effects, prosthetics and animatronics. “I love animation, I always have,” he says. “But I always wanted to direct fantastical things with special effects for movies – and I still do.”