Chris Jones is an Australian artist, animator, musician and general creative type. Born in Bendigo in central Victoria he began drawing at an early age, and soon started making "flip-books" and experimenting with Super 8 animation. He studied Industrial Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, and during this time began working as a freelance children's book illustrator. After graduation he continued illustrating and animating before becoming a computer game artist at Beam Software. He left Infogrames in May 2000 to complete work on The Passenger, and as of 2006 works as a freelance artist and animator.
Result of an amazing dedication and creativity, together with the right portion of humour, "The Passenger" is a short film animation completly created by him. This project developed through the course of eight years and completed in 2006 has received the Best Animation - 2006 Los Angeles International Short Film Festival (premiere) and the Best Australian Film - 2008 Melbourne International Animation Festival awards. Its screenplay has a quality that can be compared to ones that we are used to see from Tim Burton, grabbing the viewer from the beginning to the very end of the film.
Chris Jones in his own words: "Last century, when I started making The Passenger, all I wanted was a centerpiece for my showreel. I had been working in computer games for three and a half years, but my real ambition was to work in film. A visit to Siggraph in 1998 provided the motivation to start work on the project, and the bus commute to and from the convention supplied the theme. My objective was to create a quirky, moody, spooky, action packed overblown animation spectacular that might get me a nice job."
Now, we extract some "useless information" from chris' website... So the film Passenger contains:
10,056 frames
1,557 individual pieces of artwork including:
426 models (43MB)
809 painted textures (116MB, JPEGs)
322 scenes (191MB)
21 pre-rendered image sequences (3,156 frames)
300 dynamics simulation files (760MB)
192 sound effects tracks
450 MIDI tracks (spread across 12 sequences)
During the making of this film:
Render times averaged about 3 hours per frame
The longest render was about 8 hours per frame
An average of 0.74 seconds of film were completed per week (that's including animation, sound, everything)
Roughly 17.5 hours of sound were recorded
6 house relocations took place
I consumed around 3,500 sandwiches
A Star Wars trilogy, a Lord Of The Rings trilogy and a Harry Potter trilogy were made (not by me)
See more at: http://www.chrisj.com.au/
Result of an amazing creativity, together with the right portion of humour, "The Passenger" is a short animation created by Chris Jones. This project developed through the course of 8 years and completed in 2006 has received the Best Animation - 2006 L.A. International Short Film Festival and the Best Australian Film - 2008 Melbourne International Animation Festival awards.