Channel Frederator Blog

Sometimes, birds just oughta leave a monkey alone to relax and sculpt a tiki god head.
But Noooooo.
They don’t.
Alex Donne Johnson shows us a dirty birdie doo doo combo that is a one-two punch of cuteness to the face.
He also took some time to answer a few Channel Frederator Qs. Thanks Alex.

1. Who are some of your influences?
I’m not saying i consider myself an illustrator but I really admire the work of alot of illustrators such Pete Fowler and James Jarvis, mainly for their simplistic yet imaginative characters and the different mediums in which they apply them such as the whole vinyl toy craze, I’ve heard they are working on some animations so i can’t wait to see them. Maybe they will make their animations out of the actual vinyl toys using stop-motion, that would be cool! Also Psyop, everything they seem to do is just mind blowing.

2. How did you come up with the idea for this film?
I wanted to make a comment to the way in which when one party disrespects another’s beliefs, and that party gets angry, as soon as they retaliate, the original offender goes overboard and calls all out war. This could relate to the situation with America and the middle east, or it could just relate to a monkey with a purple statue and some birds. Either i wanted to try and express the silliness of the situation in the simplest of forms.

Also after coming up with numerous really terrible ideas, which i was dillusional enough to think were decent, but luckily enough had people around me to tell me they weren’t. However at the time i felt like they were just ‘pooping’ over my ideas. Luckily for me and thanks to them, i never made ‘Minja - The Midget Ninja’ or ‘Robo-Hoes The Movie’.

A funny thing that didn’t really help the idea, but definitely enforced the theory, were the amount of complaints we got from neighbours whilst working on the soundtrack, one old lady even come round and did an angry impression of the ‘BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP!’ sound that prevented her from watching her television and getting to sleep at night. It got to the point where they would come round in advance to complain before we even started, one classic complaint was ‘Ok well its 11:30pm on a Sunday night now, I’ve got work tomorrow, you’re probably going to start making all that noise again all night, so we’ve come round to ask in advance if you can keep it down’. By the time they had made enough complaints to warrant a possible eviction and the landlady was sent round, we had finished the animation and she managed to see the funny side!

3. Have you ever been poo-pooed on by a bird? (I only ask, because it happens to everyone at some point in time and it always makes for an entertaining tale. Plus, it happened to me.)
In England if a ‘bird’ poo-pooed on me it would probably mark the end of our relationship…

4. What do you do when you get stuck creatively?
Switch to doing something really technically boring and mind numbing, sometimes this even involves doing stuff like cleaning (not that often)…

5. What are you working on currently?
I am working as a freelancer mainly gaining clients through my website, www.alexdonne.com. I do alot of design work for print, but i am hoping now i have a few films under my belt that i can start to break into the animation industry and learn alot of new animation skills. I have a music video in the pipeline for a client and i am looking to explore applying my personal work into more live music performances or print/animation based installations.

That’s what I get for not following up on my English Slang and terminolgy. How was I supposed to know a Bird was a Girl? All this time I thought Mick Jagger was just an avid Bird Watcher…
Thanks for the great short Alex. We hope to see more from you in the near future!
-Jeaux Janovsky, avid Bird Watcher