Down in the deepest darkest cellars of the Frankenskippy laboratory, I met one splendid day with contemporary artist Liam Gillick. Liam was commissioned by the Tate Britain art gallery to put on a show in the newly landscaped gardens area. His proposal was to utilize this area as an interactive space including a minimalist furniture installation with three large screens showing a loop cycle to be animated using the cutting edge technology used at my laboratories. Liam and I brainstormed up a delicious menu of ideas. Liam attained the rights to use AnnLee, a Japanese Manga character bought initially by two French artists Phillippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe from a Japanese agency specializing in Manga characters.

So, in this second incarnation of AnnLee, Liam produced a script and basic storyboards, and then gave me license to freak her right out of the typical Manga feel. I empowered her as enchantress with powers of sorcery to draw you into her world. She moves with gestures reflective of old runic magic ritual, controlling the elements of water, fire and ether.

AnnLee was emailed to me, and thus began the first phase of her re-animated incarnation, as AnnFrankenLee. To smooth out her graceful delicate features, I laid her gently upon my operating table and created subdivisional surfaces from her former clunky polygonal self. Her dainty dress was replaced with gothic black. Her once vacant eyes pulse and glow psychedelic purple with animated UV maps. Toon shader gave her new head of hair its shine. Her lips and brow were painted blood red. Her boots tweaked to become witching boots. The glow channel was animated to give her skin its ethereal feel. Metallic reflectant shader was applied to her finger nails. About her floats her cybernetic eyes as means of vision. The inner core of these eyes is assigned a shader with animated texture on the translucence and reflection channels. The glow channel is also animated to add an electric pulsing quality.

Lars Magnus Holmgren (aka Dr. Frankenskippy)(AUS) was a member of a garage punk rock band, then started experimenting with animation and formed an archaic collaborative and multimedia performance group called Scratch My Nose. As a director he created the award winning MTV series “Tall Small Stories”.