Having recently spent time researching British animators, I have been watching the short films of Joanna Quinn. In ‘Girls Night Out’ Quinn’s Birmingham background is a clear influence. The urban scene is set very early on so that the audience can place the film. The working class, industrial 1980’s setting is made clear, and the characters’ Welsh accents give us a further idea of location without any explicit signals to it.
The style of the film itself reminded me of children’s books from the late 80’s and early 90’s, with what looks like water colour and pencil as the main medium. Quinn uses purposeful boil on the frames, and exaggerates the femininity of the protagonist, with a tongue in cheek style. This is something that notably marks Quinn’s style in further films, such as ‘Body Beautiful’ and ‘Family Ties’.
In ‘Family Ties’, Quinn masterfully animates the film from the perspective of a hand held video camera, held by Beryl, the drunken protagonist as a wedding. The chaotic nature of the wedding from Beryl’s perspective is framed perfectly from the angles approached, and pace only seems to notably pick up when Beryl attaches the camera to a dog, allowing for crude comedy scenes.
In this blog post I have attached some images from ‘Family Ties’ to demonstrate how the camera angle was achieved. I presume that Quinn approached this with references for most of the film in order to get the right angles in each scene.