I had the opportunity to sit down and interview Ryan Braund who is the brain behind the animated feature film Absolute Denial, which centers around a brilliant programmer who builds a supercomputer with unprecedented power.
The Knockturnal: How did you get started as a filmmaker, brother?
Ryan: I’ve been making films since I was probably around 16 and they were all mostly just animated films that I made in my bedroom because I always had these really big ideas, which were just unachievable live action because of no money, no resources, no team. So I’d always do animation, and surprisingly, some of them did quite well. And then I went on to go study TV and film at university, but I’d always wanted to make a feature film. It’d always been my end goal. I decided to quit the job I had at the time. This is after university and I used the money I had just to make an animated feature off my own back. So it took about a year. But that was a year, like, nonstop. The animating process itself was nine months, and that was 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It was pretty crazy.
The Knockturnal: And I assume you outsourced the animation nation.
Ryan: No, I did it all.
The Knockturnal: Oh, you did all yourself?
Ryan: Yeah, it was all on a very crap iPad. Like a very old iPad, like the fourth generation, I think, and a stylus. Now I’ve got a new iPad. Apple pencil and everything, which is so much easier, but it was just a really crap iPad and then I edited it all on my old MacBook. It was all me and it ended up being 30,000 individual drawings all hand-drawn. It was a really unhealthy process.
(Rest of the interview is in the video)
