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On the Sunny Side of the Street is a highly original and wickedly funny short film by students at the Bremen Academy of Arts in Germany. These students went on to form their own studio called ‘The Soulcage Department’. Nominated for Best Short Film in the 3D Awards last year and recipient of honorary mentions from the ADC (Art Directors Club) Germany, Sunny Side is now just one of a string of skillful and imaginative animations by Soulcage. We talk with Wilhelm Landt and Joachim Bub of Soulcage about their involvement in Sunny Side.
View 'On the Sunny Side of the Street' on CGNetworks
So how did Sunny Side come about? Both Landt and Bub studied classical Graphic Design at the Hochschule fuer Kuenste Bremen (Bremen Academy of Arts). In Landt’s and Bub’s final year, the specified theme for their graduation work was: “Action – Reaction“. This formed the basis of Sunny Side’s narrative. Then it was the personal interests and inspiration of Landt, Bub and the rest of the Soulcage Department that provided the twists and flourishes that resulted in a captivating short film.
Landt describes the film as a paradoxical situation where two characters interact, unknown to the audience, through a series of seemingly independent actions. “In a Harlem street scene in the 1920s, H.H. Sablin just wants to read his daily newspaper while his bench neighbor, Pit Doogey, very busily prepares a barbeque lunch, inflicting his needs on his unsuspecting co-star.“
While the narrative of Sunny Side is quite simple, the twist is in the approach to representing the events in an animated story. Bub explains: “The need to work on an action-reaction issue led us to the experiment with this dramaturgical stylistic device of separating its elements and taking them out of their chronological context. We showed one character's actions first and the reactions of the other afterwards. So we were looking for a simple story, which offered the possibility do this.“
Landt and Bub chose slapstick as the style for Sunny Side for its ability to engage the viewer and tell a story simply. The two characters Pit and Sablin were conceived to fit this genre. According to Bub, the artistic development of these stooge-like characters was assisted by inspiration from the work of Roger Langridge, a British cartoonist who develops characters reminiscent of Pit and Sablin.
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Pit Doogey
H. H. Sablin
On the Sunny Side of the Street ©Soulcage Dept.
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