ART | ANIMATION | BANDUNG | INDONESIA | 2022
Three events in three countries in one month made last September a busy month for The Fox The Folks team. Starting from 7-13 September 2022, The Fox The Folks together with several other projection mapping artists are presenting their work at the Indonesia Bertutur event at Borobudur Temple. Then on 9-10 September 2022, The Fox The Folks team attended the Luma Projection Arts Festival in Binghamton, New York. And last, on 17-19 September 2022, The Fox The Folks was invited back to the 1 Minute Projection Mapping competition event at the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, Tokyo, as guests and judges.
We had the opportunity to have a chat with Fadjar Kurnia, the founder and creative director of The Fox The Folks about The Fox The Folks itself and the three projects mentioned above.
The Fox The Folks was formed by Fadjar and Rafico Lingga in 2018 after they both left their respective offices. Both studying at the ITB Visual Communication Design major with a specific interest in multimedia. Fadjar and Rafico founded The Fox The Folks initially as a team of freelance animators as outsourced personnel. But over time, The Fox The Folks turned into an independent animation team that started working on projects such as music videos, commercials, and others. Then The Fox The Folks changed again to become a multimedia artist team that focuses on the storytelling of moving images with a two-dimensional visual style in various media, be it ordinary animation or video mapping.
Now The Fox The Folks team consists of five people. One person as founder and creative director, one person in charge of marketing and business development, two visual artists and co-producers, and one animator. ‘But because The Fox The Folks is such a small team, roles often adapt to the needs of each project. So often I still participate in making animations as an animator,’ explained Fadjar. With this team composition, The Fox The Folks can work on an average of one animation project in one month.
“Actually it started from personal selfishness,” said Fadjar when we asked about the philosophy behind the name The Fox, The Folks. “It’s kind of hard to say, right? A bit tongue-twister. However, the answer to why it’s called ‘The Fox, The Folks’ is ‘My team, my ways’. That’s it, haha.”
“Well, but behind that, there is also a philosophy why the name is The Fox The Folks. First, ‘the fox’ is the embodiment of our way of thinking which is smart, cunning, and intelligent in moving even though we are a small team. Meanwhile, ‘the folks’ themselves were inspired by the people who gathered (folks) who would usually exchange stories. That’s where storytelling activities emerge. Besides that, ‘the fox’ is a symbol of The Fox The Folks team while ‘the folks’ is a symbol of our audience,” Fadjar explained.
After he told us about The Fox The Folks in general, Fadjar shared stories about the three projects mentioned earlier to us. We write about the three projects chronologically starting from Indonesia Bertutur, Luma Projection Arts Festival, and 1 Minute Projection Mapping.
INDONESIA BERTUTUR
Taking place on September 7-13 2022 at Borobudur Temple, The Fox The Folks together with several other artists and projection mapping animation studios are displaying their respective works. At the event, artists and animation studios were asked to create a projection mapping animation that responds to one of the twenty cultural heritages in Indonesia as the projection mapping content. The Fox The Folks presented their work entitled “Harta, Tahta, and Papua” which means “Treasure, Throne, and Papua”.
“In this work, we combine elements of legends – for example, the legend of how Raja Ampat was formed – its cultural heritage, music, as well as traditional dances. Starting from the animation to the music in the video, everything is inspired by the land of Papua. As for the story itself, we tell folk stories which are quite interesting actually,” Fadjar explained to us about “Harta, Tahta, and Papua”.
“This folklore tells of a husband and wife who found seven eggs where four of these seven eggs hatched into humans. These four people grew into separate princes and each became king in four different places,” explained Fadjar. The four places referred to in this story are Waigeo, Salawati, East Misool, and West Misool.
“Besides we just found out about this folklore, we also just found out that Raja Ampat is included in the category of cultural heritage, not a national park.”
LUMA PROJECTION ARTS FESTIVAL
At the event which took place from 9-10 September 2022 in Binghamton, New York, The Fox The Folks was the first Asian and Indonesian artist to participate in this annual event which has been taking place since 2015. At this event, The Fox The Folks presented their work entitled “Joy Boy”. This animation work tells the story of a child who is trapped in a game world and tries to return to his world but doesn’t forget to have fun in all the games available.
“Actually, we made this work and we adapted it to the target audience of the Luma festival itself where the audience (most of whom are adults) are expected to reminisce about their childhood and only focus on having fun with this Joy Boy. Because this festival is an annual festival, in our opinion, visitors who come must also feel happy. And the results turned out to be in accordance with what we had in mind from the start. Many adults who seemed to have fun at the event saw us bringing retro elements to this ‘Joy Boy’.
1 MINUTE PROJECTION MAPPING
At the event this time, which took place on 17-19 September 2022 at the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery in Tokyo, The Fox The Folks were invited as judges and guests. There, The Fox The Folks presented a work entitled “Ad Astra” which means to go to the stars.
“We are responding to the theme of this year’s event which is ‘life’. We want to show another side of life that is told from the character Bintang who tries to go against normalcy to achieve his own dream of becoming a star. In this work, we want to convey the message that we are stars in our own lives.”
In addition to the three projects described above, we also asked Fadjar to tell us about the projects he likes the most and the projects he thinks are the most difficult to work on so far.
“My favorite project is ‘Ad Astra’ for 1 Minute Projection Mapping this year and ‘Through The Night’ for the same event last year. But actually, all of The Fox’s The Folks is my favorite work because we do it for fun.”
“Most of the projects are difficult but I want to part these two difficulties, difficult in terms of content and difficult in terms of field or field. The content-wise difficulty was last year’s 1 Minute Projection Mapping, which we won there. It was difficult because at that time we had just started to explore projection mapping, were still exploring the medium, and were still exploring the world of projection mapping. At that time, we were still looking for the identity of The Fox The Folks and differentiating The Fox The Folks from other teams in this industry.”
“The second difficulty is difficult in terms of medium. The work that is difficult in terms of medium is the work that we present in Indonesia Bertutur. It turns out that the medium is not that easy to map because it has steps and the walls are reliefs. In the end, there are lots of shadows and there are images that are not clearly visible because of the shadows. It’s only from here that we learn valuable lessons too.”
Lastly, we asked about Fadjar’s most memorable moment so far in The Fox The Folks. “Last year we won the 1 Minute Projection Mapping competition and the euphoria is still felt today. This competition is arguably one of the biggest projection mapping competitions in the world and last year The Fox The Folks won two prizes, namely the grand prize and the audience prize. Since winning this competition, The Fox The Folks have started to be recognized in this industry and we are called a rising star because we were never seen and then suddenly appeared.”
“This is the most precious moment because we, The Fox The Folks team, are starting to get noticed and that event opened up opportunities to build relationships with friends and cool people who are not only from Indonesia but also from abroad. And that’s the most fun thing anyway. I hope that we can collaborate with all of you in the future.”
All the background music in the three animated videos above was made by Rolly Anwari/Fantascape.
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