Art Brute is a recurring feature that asks artists of every calibre, every style, about their recent work.

Award-winning animator Nick Cross (Spumco, Nickelodeon, New Line Entertainment) just released 'Yellow Cake,' a gorgeously rendered parable on escalation and terror. And fluffy animals. After stumbling onto the short and being completely charmed by its conceit, I was compelled to contact the Ottawa native (via Vimeo, of all places), and press him on its creation.


You began this project back in 2006. How much work went into animating Yellow Cake?
Animation is by its very nature, a lot of work.  I work in Flash in order to speed up my production but it is still very time-consuming.  About halfway through the production, I invested in a Cintiq tablet which enabled me to draw and animate directly in Flash.  That sped me up a lot. I also painted all of the backgrounds in Photoshop as opposed to painting them traditionally. But still, to give you a bit of an idea, there was an average of 8-12 drawings for every second of animation, and the film was just over 8 minutes in length (SD: that's over 4800 drawings).  Also, there were over 150 individual scenes in the film each requiring its own background.  Each background took anywhere from 1-6 hours to paint.  And that doesn't take into consideration the writing, editing, sound design etc.   It's a lot of labour, but it's a labour of love.

How did the challenges of Yellow Cake differ from your previous short, The Waif of Persephone?
I don't really make enough from the production of these short films to be able to do them full-time, so the main challenges were in finding the time to work on it in between my commercial jobs.  So, even though the film has technically been in production for almost three years, a large chunk of that time I didn't work on it at all.  I was so busy with paying work that I didn't get a chance to work on it at all in 2008.  This was basically the same problem I had with the production The Waif of Persephone.

What compelled you to use adorable characters to explore Bush-era fears?
I thought of it sort of like a fable, using cute animals to tell a story more universality.  It's like adding some sugar to make the medicine taste better, something like that anyway.  The idea for the film came to me in 2003, around the time of the build-up to the war in Iraq.  There was a lot of talk about 'yellow cake' uranium being sold in ominous tones, but I always thought of yellow cake as being a delicious dessert treat.  I thought that the contrast was really funny and that got my creative juices flowing.  I always enjoy the idea of blending cute things with something horrible; it's just such an extreme contrast that I can't resist going back to that well over-and-over again.

Without spoiling too much, why did you choose to end the short the way it did?
It was an attempt to put a final twist of reality, albeit in a slightly surreal way.  A lot of the choices I make, story-wise are pretty much instinctual.  I don't follow any sort of formula or framework with my story process. It just felt like the right way to end it - combining a joke with a bit of social commentary.  I wasn't directly intending it to be an indictment of the audience, but it definitely can serve that purpose.  

Now that this mammoth project's done, how do you plan on relaxing?
Ha, doing this stuff is how I relax.  My next film is going to be even bigger I think... I've already started on it. There's no rest for the wicked.