Spite Your Face Productions

Making cartoons and films as a grown-up job since 1999. Animation works by Tony Mines.

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We’re stepping down our Tumblr activity, because nipples. There will still be updates, but we’re making the predictable move to Instagram. Above is the trailer we put together for what you can find in this feed, back when we had more optimism for the possibilities of Tumblr. This archive still stands as one of the best resources for exploring our past work, but our move to Instagram will be more future focused. www.instagram.com/spiteyourface

www.spiteyourface.com

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Our animation reel for 2019, updated with a tonne of new work.

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A collection of rotoscope animations we executed for a limited-run film on the Guardian newspaper website, reframed here for exhibition. Hand drawn vector animation over original video and performance.

Spiritual sequel to this film.

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LEGO animations to advertise your business or product. Your message wants to stand out in the marketplace. SYF offer a bespoke, stop-motion animation service for your Explainer and Brand Communications needs. Break from the usual video mold using a LEGO Explainer from SYF, or using one of our other unique hand-crafted styles. Visit spiteyourface.com to get in touch.

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Spite Your Face Productions (SYF) are proud to unveil the product of their latest stop-motion animation workshop. Ice Cream Headache - a LEGO Batman Movie represents the creative work of over 150 children and is a collaboration between SYF and Leeds Young Film Festival.

The animation workshops were executed by Tony Mines for SYF, the sound workshops by Dave Dunn-Birch for DBME, and the workshops were supported by funding from Leeds City Council, The BFI Film Fund, The National Lottery (UK), and Arts Council England. Will was granted by The LEGO Group to run the workshops, but the film is a non-commercial work released under an education/fair use banner.

The film was animated to completion in just three days over the Easter weekend, by twelve groups of young animators aged 8 and up. Each group was tasked with developing the story content and ideas for each scene, with only minimum information provided on what occurred in the scenes before, thereby creating a kind of ‘exquisite corpse’ styled, stream of consciousness storyline. Each of the twelve groups were guided to build their ideas around one of the twelve steps in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, focusing on character motivations and consequence, so as to tie the collected madness to a loosely interpreted classic hero's journey. For many it was their first time animating, and for most their first time animating with professional software, but Tony provided tips and tricks for the groups to quickly turn around a higher caliber of animation. In parallel, Dave Dunn-Birch ran audio workshops where yet more kids evolved the soundtrack using a similar ‘blind’ scene-by-scene approach.

The result is an exemplary collaborative work produced in a very short time, with a story that seems to loosely mirror aspects of both The LEGO Batman Movie (2017) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) - neither of which most of the kids had seen at the time - simply by virtue of tying the Batman character to a hero’s journey structure. This release represents the first time everyone involved has seen all their work together.

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See, how it is, is it's like The Exorcist.

Back when they still made horror movies they understood that what you do is you aim the horror at the person who thinks they're the smartest going in. You don't aim it at the folks who are already superstitious, who carry a readiness to believe in a literal Devil or a cosmic morality, who are there for a perverse form of vindication through bloodletting. You aim it at the ones think they're too smart for this shit.

The Exorcist takes that person through all the motions. In the first act the mother is a smart educated Hollywood liberal type. She's an actress in an Erin Brokovitch type film within the film that she condescends is "like the Walt Disney version of the Ho Chi Minh story". When a literal demon begins manifesting through her daughter she does all the things that you would do. They take her to a doctor, they take her to a clinical psychologist. They talk about the ability of the mind to make manifestations on the body. They cite precedent, use context, provide evidence. They employ science, empirical reality, rationalism and causality. And at every turn they are wrong. Because this isn't that universe. This is the universe where the devil is real and exists.

When she eventually goes to a priest, rationalism having failed, he is a modern liberalised priest who tells her that the Bible is full of metaphors and that demons are ideas which emerged out of an unwillingness to understand mental illness and disease. And again he is wrong, because this isn't that universe. This is the universe where the worst of us are vindicated, where the ones who say that reality itself is a moralising agent and concurs with them in their lowest and most judgemental aspects - they speak the truth. It doesn't matter what you think you know about cognitive bias or moral projection, about history and empathy. It doesn't matter. Because it turns out those are not the rules. The rules are God is real and he's on the devils side. The devil may have even invented him.

And like The Exorcist, it gets worse the more you know. When you're a kid you think The Exorcist is kinda goofy, with the vomit and wotnot. Why not? It's all a bit of fun.

But when you watch it with mature eyes you understand that a child is vividly mutilating her vagina with a crucifix and screaming sexual invitations to a grown man, her agency stolen by governing forces, and that this is the most serious shit ever happened.

That is the world you've woken up in. Because the threat isn't Trump, it's the vindication. We all understand that centrism failed and that the angry people it left behind deserve help. But that is not the platform Trump stands on. That association needs dropping, and when it suits him, he'll drop it. His presidency stands on a platform that is not subject to the voices it rejected. It doesn't need to hear latino voices, black voices, queer voices, women. It has vindicated itself without those things. That is the real horror.

We are not in Bernie's movie. We are not even in Hillary's movie that has Bernie cameos. We are in his His movie.

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Aim for the flat top! Here's a music video I shot last summer with Douce Angoisse.  I like this video because Douce and I have an effortless creative relationship for improvising this stuff. Like the one we shot on Times Square in 2012, we came up with and shot the whole deal inside of like 45 minutes. This is my answer to the question of Chris Doyle shooting illegally at the Airport that one time. We basically just walked to the pub and back. The moral of the story is my friends shit gold.

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Behance page, can you handle it?

I just added a profile page for myself/SYF on Behance. There’s a lot of new and unseen stuff on there, and it’s perhaps the most comprehensive guide available to precisely which layer of hell we’re going to and why. If you’re on there please take a look and follow us. We haven’t really figured out what Behance even is yet tbh...

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Some thoughts:

What does it even mean to claim there is a new Star War in 2015? We can take the nihilistic consumer view, and accept that because some persons who have acquired the legal rights to make such a claim have released a new product under those auspices, that it follows that such is the case. But is this really any audience members precondition for what constitutes a Star War? Again, we can be capitalist-nihilists and say that all consumer commodities are intangible, authorless, even ruderless. But surely Star Wars is born of a moment? There was a legitimate moment of unprecedented creative flourish, marking multiple converging circumstance from which a movie-film was born and to which any greater commodification - we are supposed to be able to argue - is periphery. If we are not completely awful people then surely the measure of whether there is, in fact, a new Star War must be contingent on an equivocal confluence of happenstance and impulse?

On the plus side, everything is horrible. If a Star War had come out in 2007 it would have been a fucking disaster because the western world would have still been performing to the lie that it was going some place. Now, fortunately, capitalism is in free fall, everybody is miserable and nobody has any money. Which is precisely the circumstances prerequisite to the releasing of a good Star War.

On the down side, there is neither happenstance nor impulse involved. The conditions in advance of a Star War in 1977 were none conditions. Nobody asked for it, and nobody knew they were getting it until after they got it. Today there are very stringently monitored conditions for how much sand should or shouldn't be involved, the syntax of sentences from particular characters mouths, the height and width of particular made up species, and a highly systematised and prescriptive reading of character informed by whom ejaculated over whom and in which particular order.

These are not the preconditions for free and imaginative film making. I have no expectation of Mr Abrams to tread the well fenced paths of “Midichlorians” or “Trade Embargoes”, or to act against any other micro-aggresions demarcated and policed by the Neighbourhood Watch that is fandom. I fully expect him to colour inside the lines and to know which crayons the community approves. But is that going to be any kind of fun to watch?

I just want you to know in advance that if this film is "definitely better than the prequels" but also "kinda rote and pedestrian" that it is 100% the fault of you and your entitlement and fuck you.

Abrams is working with Michael Kaplan again, who costume designed his Star Trek movies and who also dressed Blade Runner. These are the things which actually matter. They matter a lot more than whether or not you liked the pod-racing. They matter because they speak to an actual continuity of practice between individual and collaborative professional artists. Kaplan never dressed a Star War before but his work dates back to the same period, so the designs that are coming out of this new film are first hand, they aren't inbred derivatives of an incestuous videogame semiotic. The question raised is whether or not we are in an age possessed of or even requiring new Dykstra's or McQuarrie's to make up the numbers?

Another important point is that cinema is dead. I don't know if this works in the projects favour or not? Cinema wasn't dead in 1977, in fact American cinema was more creatively healthy than at any other time, and Star Wars kinda ruined all that. But it was on it's arse financially, competing against home entertainment, so the stakes are very similar again. If this one movie doesn't work out I think we all get to write off the whole enterprise. We can close and rebrand all the movie theaters as Marvel themed creches and lock all the teenage boys in there forever. They won’t even notice. We can throw in sandwiches through the roof once in a while.

Time and performance management will tell...

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Newly remastered and presented for the first time ever in HD, Spider-Man: The Peril of Doc Ock. Produced in 2004 to coincide with the theatrical release of Spider-Man 2.

Play this one loud for the amazing original score from BAFTA winning composer Jason Graves (Tomb Raider, Dead Space).

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Continuing our remastering of our older works, presented for the very first time in HD here’s Star Wars: The Han Solo Affair from 2002.

Who shot first? We shot first. Commissioned by Lucasfilm to coincide with the theatrical release of Episode II, this was the first short film produced under the Star Wars license this century - the first since the Boba Fett cartoon in 1977.

There are no midichlorians in this remaster, just some video clean-up to make it good as new.

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This week marks the 40th Anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Waaay back around the 25th Anniversary we produced a LEGO animated short for the DVD release. Above you can watch a newly remastered 40th anniversary edition of that film, presented in true HD for the first time. Described by Stuff You Should Know podcast as “Probably the best (brickfilm)” and by Terry Gilliam, upon who’s original pitch the film was commissioned, as “Definitely the best version of the film”, this was the original millennial meme that helped jump-start the brickfilm genre (sorry about that).

Visit www.spiteyourface.com for more decontextualized quotes and hyperbole.

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We really like this one. Vodka Red Butch (Slow & Dirty Edition) the first of two new videos for the release of the e.p Golden Tuna. We went for stripped-down, apologetically raw film making of the Douce Angoisse live show to accompany the bass-heavy, dirty-weekend electro. Headphones for this one. We like to think of this as our Texas Chainsaw. Mildly NSFW if your W happens to suck. 

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Here’s a series of photos describing the pre-production process on a LEGO film, specifically the stage design process, which I consider a form of illustration.

At the top you have a catered order from Bricklink, the LEGO-specific online market site, which represents the product of days of work, building models in my head and trying to second-guess what parts exactly I might need, all while trying to find them available locally or from as few different vendors as possible.

Then you see my hi-tech storyboarding process, scratched out in ball-point on paper scraps to be scanned and compiled later. I tend to draw very small, so that I can look at shot compositions side by side and tell if they’re going to match up in the edit.

Then you see a set of props and ‘locations’ coming efficiently together with not a brick to spare. Set building for animation follows much the same logic as those Hollywood studio-lot sets with the fake walls and flat building frontages. You don’t have to build for anything but the camera, but you have to build sturdier than you might for display-only models.

You can see scenes from the finished film as part of this showreel. The finished film is not available online.

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A sneak preview of our upcoming music video Vodka Red Butch (Slow &Dirty Edition) for Douce Angoisse. Volume and headphones for some base-y filthy electro!

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The first of two new music videos, headed your way this time tomorrow! Douce Angoisse single Vodka Red Butch (Dirty & Slow Edition) from the forthcoming E.P, Golden Tuna. Filthy, grinding, base heavy electro for the lovers. I’m proud of this one, it’s stripped down film making and really filthy. “We have such wonderful things to show you”

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She comes in colours.