Few environments provide insights into the depths of human behavior like the crucible of crowded late-night public transit – a fact Scottish director/animator Ross Hogg takes full advantage of in his latest animated short.

Based on designs from Glasgow illustrator/art director Sean Mulvenna, and produced thru the LUX Scotland program with BBC Now & Next, The Last Train provides a non-linear, impressionistic look at what Hogg calls “a diverse cross-section of tired, drunk, disgruntled, joyous and riotous strangers.”

Sean Mulvenna on the pair’s animation process: “For each scene, I would draw keyframes. Ross would take these, space them out on a timeline and then draw all movement in-between: 12 drawings for every one second of the scene.

“Ross would do these in-betweens with the single-minded focus of a robot attack dog, or maybe some sort of animation monk.

“After that, Ross would send me all his inbetweens and the keyframes and I’d then draw over them to get the nice one-color look. Over the whole film, there were about eighteen hundred frames so I was doing this over most of the two-month production.

“I then gave Ross back the finished drawings and he stitched them together, added some grain, the background color, and a bunch of other animation secrets these types have in their back pockets.”
 

BBC Exec Producers: Stephen James-Yeoman & Pauline Law

Director/animator: Ross Hogg
Design/Illustration: Sean Mulvenna

Original Music: Simon Liddell, Andy Monaghan
Sound design: Keith Duncan

A Ross Hogg/LUX Scotland Production for Now & Next