Dave Rowntree

I can’t explain it to you. I could tell you why I’m involved in it, but I think Damon got involved in cartoons so he’d have less work to do. I got involved in cartoons so I’d have more work to do. I think the original point of Gorillaz was that they didn’t have to tour. But now they’re doing these tours that are just so complicated and so involved. It’s become more work than just forming a band and going on tour.

Yes, I still do though we don’t make Empire Square. Before I was an excellent drummer, I was a computer programmer. I’ve been a computer programmer since I was ten or eleven and I got into animation that way. Most of a tour is just boring. You sit around with nothing to do. So I started carrying a laptop around with me and doing my computer work on the road. But then I started getting interested in animation when it became possible to do it on a laptop. I started doing little short animations and when people saw them, they asked if I could do work for them and it just snowballed. I formed a little company and we started doing TV in the UK.

No, I direct Empire Square but my company doesn’t make it. My company has had to take a bit of a break because I don’t have enough time to do it. Me and two other people came up with the idea for Empire Square about two or three years ago. The animation is done by a company in India; the drawing is done by a company in Germany. All the character design is done on pen and paper and then it’s converted to pixels and put in Flash where all the animation is done.

I actually went out to India and supervised it there. In fact, we do the storyboards and the animatics in Flash, so then we send the Flash files to India to do the fill in animation.

It is, I’m actually Hooks [laughs].

I think we were looking to take on the targets that annoyed us the most. So it reflects our personalities in that respect. Though I don’t think we identify with any of the characters. If anything I’m most like Rabbit because when it comes down to it, I’m a bit of a geek.

Well, I don’t write it. We have a team of writers. We have an English writer named Matt Morgan and two American writers. But all the shows made for the first series on Channel Four in the UK were three minutes long. I’d say one of the big problems with working with Fuse has been ramping out to half hour shows. We’ve had a couple of false starts along the way but we’ve figured it out now. If you can figure out how to entertain for three minutes it sounds like a reasonable thing to do it for 22 but we had to rethink the show, refigure out who our characters are and what the hell they want. It’s a really interesting thing to do actually.

Well it’s about these three characters, Rabbit, Richie and Hooks set in a faceless American town where everything is crumbling. They live in a building called Number One Empire Square and that’s the premise really. They’re amoral in the way that you imagine kids today are amoral. Every generation looks out at the next generation and imagines that they have no morals at all. It’s a satire of that way of thinking because it’s bollocks. The next generation does have morals. Everyone’s parents believe that they are the beginning of the end. But yet we’re still doing it now. We never learn. We never use the benefit of experience and figure out that actually the next generation are just different, they’re no worse.

With animation, you direct in two halves. I direct the actors in the sound recording and then I have to direct the animators to produce the animation. What you miss out on is the editing stage. When you direct live action you shoot as much as you physically can and then you edit. You don’t quite get that luxury in animation because you’re paying thousands of dollars per second for the animators to work, so every wasted second is thousands of wasted dollars.

We had a series of shorts for channel four here in the UK. So we put together a half hour clip show from all the shorts we’ve made, showed it at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last year and that’s how we met Fuse.

I think we’re blazing our own trail, really. This is a new thing for Fuse to be doing and this is a whole new process for us. What was attractive about Fuse, was that they are a music station and that their reference points are our reference points. Also they are trying to go the extra mile. We meshed really well together right from the start. I’m really excited to be working with Fuse, they’re really a great company and I’ve learned an awful lot from the people I’ve met here.

We started the next record, shortly after we finished touring the first one. We’ve chipped away at it. We’ll have a new record out maybe next year, who knows. If you start a Blur record, you can’t stop for three years. It’s not something where you can do a little bit and have a bit of a break. Once the record’s out, you’ve got to tour for 18 months. Once you’re on that carousel you’ve got to stay on. We’ve all got other things on the go so we have to pick our moments to release records.

I may do other projects. Music’s something you just can’t stop doing. If you’re infected by the music virus, there’s no way out unfortunately. You play to stay sane.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck