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A good friend of mine has started doing reviews of some of cinema’s more sleazy digressions. Check it out!

Here is the project that myself and the rest of The Last Quest have been working on for the last three months. We all love doing it and the results have been pretty awesome. Check out all the awesome local Seattle music we use for the soundtracks!

For my roomate’s birthday I decided to make a film. An event happen to them involving a physical fall and time lost in a coma. I wanted to address this somehow and try to fill in for the images and time lost in that event. To me direct animation is visual representation compressing time and experience into one fluid form. It is abstract representation in about as pure a form as you can get. In the best circumstances it is a reinterpretation of the old cliche “life flashing before our eyes.” Is my starting ambition overwrought and pretentious? Maybe. But hopefully a stretch that a friend would appreciate.

This is a very old videoblog I did back in school that shows a similar process to what made the raw film used here.

Unlike my pretty blustery videoblog above I did not run the film through a projector to capture the images.

Here is the scan used to make all the images in the film.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

This time I scanned the film and used After Effects to scroll down the footage in precise rhythm. The lack of a shutter dissolves the flickery snap that goes along with running it through a projector to capture it. I recognized this and decided to embrace it for this particular experiment.

After doing the initial assembly of the raw footage I dropped the frame rate down to 15 frames a second in an attempt to further separate the visual texture of this film from my other direct animation work. It had an interesting effect. The footage felt much more like an exercise in visual meditation than the usual overwhelming flood of flickery randomness that people associate with direct animation. With the sound I wanted to further this feeling of meditation with synth drones. The sound seems to do the trick for me. Watching this film again I also did not expect to be as transfixed by the gritty topographical texture that the pulled off bits of spray paint seem to give parts of the film.

There is a lot of power and poetry in direct animation. Stan Brakhage spent the later part of his life chasing this. There have been times in my life I understand why. To me direct animation is still the purest form of film making. You don’t need a camera or a computer, you don’t need much money or a bunch of people to help with the work, all you need is some kind of film base to start from and a creative desire for experimentation. It is the most tactile and personal experience I have ever had making films.

I always seem to forget that my first love in film making was animation. After making this… my brain is bubbling with experiments for the future again.

Here is the finished film:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

So just got The Hot Dog Cycle site up… it is janky but functional. Have a bit more work to do before I call it good. Stooopid HTML CSS making me crazy. Just put that there!!! Oh well.

Had to give Jed a lifeline phone call on web crap ala Who wants to be a millionare? He informed me of awesome things that I have yet to explore involving a video embedding implementation of a free flash plug-in that plays just about every file that I work with.

Also put up The Hot Dog Cycle trailer up on Youtube… I am super dissatisfied in the quality. Probably going to upload again in the next few day.