Smith & Foulkes

Why did you choose animation as your medium?
Foulkes: I like drawing and telling stories.
Smith: We dabble in other mediums, but it offers much to the control freak.

What was Brian Eno’s role in your forming a creative team at the Royal College of Art?
Foulkes: He liked our stuff. He even sent his mate David Bowie over to have a look at the department. But Alan and I didn’t really work together until after we left.
Smith He came, he saw, he mentioned us in his diary, he left. We took it as a sign that we should be together.

What’s the difference, creatively, between creating a short film and an advertisement or pop video?
Foulkes: When we were making This Way Up, I felt that we had the freedom to hold on to a shot or a character’s expression for as long as we wanted. But at the same time there’s a danger of outstaying your welcome. You can’t be self indulgent; you have to move on fast enough to prevent people getting bored.
Smith: The advantage is that you’re only answerable to yourselves.

How difficult was it mixing live action and animation for Avatar, the Coke Super Bowl ad?
Foulkes: We made very detailed animatics, then matched the live action to it. The shoot was in sunny Buenos Aires. On the second day, it started raining. It didn’t stop.
Smith: We had to do an unbelievable amount of meticulous planning before, during and after the shoot to try to make something look randomly natural.

What did you learn about new developments in animation when you visited Hollywood studios?
Foulkes: At Dreamworks they showed us a clip from their new movie, Monsters vs. Aliens, and we would definitely like to have a play with the InTru™3D technology they’ve used. It makes the
animatic process far simpler and it opens up a mind-blowing number of possibilities.

Describe your childhood.
Foulkes: A chopper bike and scabby knees. I had a normal childhood, although we moved
around a lot because of my dad’s job; he was in management. It was difficult going to a series of different schools but I was lucky because I played lots of sport, which helps in those situations. You turn up at a new school and the other kids look at you funny, but then they see you can kick a ball and suddenly you’re in.
Smith: Dislocated. There was a lot of travelling between life with Mum in Gloucester and life with Dad, 100 miles away in Chester. They broke up when I was only four, so my brother and I got very used to sitting in a car and switching between the two houses every week. It was good in a way because I had two families and two worlds, but it’s hard to put down constant roots when you’re constantly on the move.

Were you happy as a child?
Foulkes: Annoyingly so.
Smith: I’m not in therapy about it. Yet.

What did becoming a father mean to you?
Foulkes: We’d been talking about having a child for a while so when it happened it was really exciting. It’s also a lot of fun now that Rufus is running about and shouting.
Smith: I think that maybe it made me take work more seriously. I realised I had to make money, rather than doing no-budget promos and so on, because I had a child to support. Bearing in mind my own childhood, I would obviously like my kids to grow up in a nice secure family and not have us split up, although they’ll probably rebel against it and say, why did you not give us a more interesting life?

What do you believe a child needs most?
Foulkes: A fun, loving environment, lots of fresh air, and chocolate.
Smith: Encouragement, love and something/ someone to believe in. Though my son tells me it’s computer games.

What sort of education did you have?
Foulkes: I somehow managed to get through school playing football and doing art.
Smith: A fairly uninspiring grammar school in rural Gloucestershire, followed by too many years at various art schools.

You work very closely together. What are the problems involved in such an intense collaboration?

Do you ever feel there is a stigma attached to working in advertising?
Foulkes: If it’s good work, then no. But to some we’ll always be the advertising boys.
Smith: It hasn’t done Ridley Scott or David Fincher any harm. But when you’re introduced at film screenings as ‘the advertisers’, it does make you wonder.

Are you ever ashamed about the amount of money that is spent in advertising?
Foulkes From the outside, it seems outrageous; from the inside it’s never enough.
Smith Have you any idea how much it costs to keep our Learjet running?

Are you worried that the credit crunch will affect your work?
Smith: It already has. You have to make the same work for much less money, but the quality must never suffer, so somehow you've got to make the sums add up. Even when we were doing Coke Avatar we pitched a creative route and budget that we thought was just about do-able and then the agency came back to say somebody else had produced a much lower figure and could we meet it. It's pretty fierce out there; everyone is trying to undercut each other.