Animation screening Feb 3rd

Last summer I was inspired by an ad for an analog animating class hosted by Dogbotic, which prompted me to pick up my stylus and doodle one quickly as a promo for an event I was doing. What began as a charming one-off 5 frame animation turned into a collection of 5 complete looping animations within the next six months. I didn't make them for any special intent, it was just something that I enjoyed experimenting with, with the attempts to push myself past the limitations of the previous one by trying a new style, brush or color palette.

As luck would have it, around Halloween I won a free Dogbotic class from a raffle I entered, so I decided to take the one on analog animating. One week I wasn't able to complete the traditional stop-motion blackboard assignment, so I did it digitally. It was a rush job, like I liked the concept and the style, I wasn't happy with the ending and it didn't loop - which is my favorite quality to animating short form work. After I showed it in class, I decided to rework it - something I hadn't done with any of the others I had made. I ended up doubling the length of it and fell in love with the ending, because nothing goes hand in hand quite like hot dogs and kite flying : ) When I wrapped the final edits, I saw Agitator Gallery was hosting an animation showcase, so again as luck would have it - I had amassed an entire visual compilation, however it lacked the full immersion that a good soundtrack brings. So I set out to correct that.

I have a synth cave where my entire collection lives, but this time I wanted to challenge myself with a different workflow. Sometimes having too many options can slow down ideation, so I tried different approaches I haven't ever toyed with - I used only two portable synths to compose the entire score, recorded it with my voice recorder and worked upstairs where I usually paint. It was the best decision I could've made!

I wrapped recording with about 15 minutes of sound and gave that to my partner chop up and sync to the different animations. It's funny/befuddling to think how much finessing goes into syncing up a fourth of an hour of bleeps and bloops to a minute and a half of footage. Even though the ratio is big, there was still footage that wasn't scored, so I did another round of recording for about 7 minutes and finally assigned a sound for every moment.

There are two ways to score a film, start with the footage and make music and sounds specifically for each moment OR create many sonic swatches, pull from that and splice it all together. I like to score with the ladder workflow, I think it injects a lot of spontaneity and opens the doors to having many more a-ha! moments than anything I could've prescribed and purposefully tried to define. I call these moments of serendipity "puppet magic," even if I'm not working on on a puppet show. The roots of puppet magic are found when something artistically comes together perfectly without meticulous planning: a quick cut without a template that fits like a glove, a mistake that turns out better than what was intended, or discovering a movement you didn't build for but looks effortless and purposeful.

That being said, in this case, I'm not naive or discrediting that much of the magic pumped into my short filmmaking process is conjured by the hands of my partner who is one of the best editors in the industry. (this isn't a bias because he's so handsome, his impressive CV backs this up) We make a really great team and making short films together is one of my favorite art forms because collaborating with him is so fun and he makes my footage look like a billion bucks. He's super supportive of my art career and always invested in my creative process, no matter how obscene the timeline may be. I'm really lucky he's an editor because if he wasn't I would have made 0 short films in my adult life, that part of the workflow frustrates me to no end and brings me no joy - so our director/editor combo is really a dream come true <3

Come check out the Agitator Animation where my scored compilation of animations will debut on Saturday, February 3rd from 6 - 10p at Agitator Gallery in Chicago!

I'll be debuting my animations one by one on my House of Egregious instagram soon, and then after I'll put my compilation to my Short Films page.