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Drawing on Inspiration: How to Make Animation with No Money
By Mike Plante
From Don Hertzfeldt's The Meaning of Life
In the age of Pixar, an animated film is the result of a system. Each feature takes years to complete from the original idea to the finished film in theaters. In the best cases, this process produces great movies. Animators, directors, writers and executives spend years crafting stories, artwork and characters. But these lengthy schedules aren't just about striving for perfection: the technical work involved in making these films is enormous, requiring whole departments of animators and entire banks of servers. With computer animation, each frame takes between six and 90 hours to render — none are drawn by hand. With animated epics costing upwards of $150 million, each second in these films costs over $25,000.
But alongside the rise of Pixar's capital-intensive work has been a resurgence of defiantly low-fi animation created by artists working alone in a DIY (do-it-yourself) fashion. Some use off-the-shelf, consumer software to make their movies. Others create their own physical tools using items more commonly found in office-supply stores. When asked to compare his budgets to those of Pixar's, animator Brent Green laughs, "All in (computer, camera, dremel, plastic, glass, sharpies, wood), I'd say each second costs about 80 cents!"
Academy Award-nominated animator Don Hertzfeld analogizes this movement to that of punk rockers. Studio animations are like orchestras of incredibly talented musicians lead by powerful conductors, he says, while these DIY animators are the garage bands, making their own guitar pickups from broken equipment and patching together pedals to get unusual sounds. Other animators see themselves as artisans, bringing a handcrafted, fine-arts sensibility back to an art form whose mainstream innovations are now most closely associated with high-end computer graphics. "It becomes tiresome trying to 'keep up' [with technology]," says artist and animator Martha Colburn. "I'm into falling off the barometer of technology altogether in my work. I wish I could make [my films] without lights — even they seem to cause me problems, angst and heat stroke!"
Today's DIY animators screen not in multiplexes but in a variety of non-theatrical venues. They set up their own 16mm or video projectors in all-age punk rock warehouses, play high art museums like the Getty and MoMA alongside the works of Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage and Man Ray, and screen at a variety of film festivals that rest comfortably in between those worlds. Budgetary limitations show up most often in length — most DIY animators are making shorts, not features — and in the time spent on an individual film. M. Dot Strange, a rarity (along with Bill Plympton) in the DIY world as his We Are the Strange is feature-length, comments, "It can end up taking a lot longer to complete a film because you can't hire additional animators to speed up the process." Elaborates Hertzfeld, "If you have half the money, it just means you have to work twice as hard. That's the beauty of animation — you're not limited by anything other than what you can draw. If you can afford the film stock (or the software), your real cost is all the personal time it takes."
Here is a look at six defiantly lo-fi animators who are turning their lack of resources into an art form.
Virgil Widrich
Virgil Widrich uses machines — specifically, photocopiers — to make his films. In the frenzied worlds of his Copy Shop and Fast Film, still frames we are all familiar with (photocopied black-and-white pages and color printer copies) are arranged by hand and frame-by-frame in an origami fashion, and then filmed and replaced. Filmed scenes and found footage get reworked into new universes. For Fast Film, Widrich used the sound and feel of tearing paper as both a textural and organizing element. Using film frames printed out as objects, he took thousands of frames from 400 movies and reworked them to make a film about cinema's history of good guys, villains and screaming heroines.
Brent Green
Pennysylvania's Brent Green has said he was never convinced that 24 frames-per-second were even necessary. His intimate stop motion work is inspired by his own family history — Hadacol Christmas concerns an eccentric, dying grandfather, Paulina Hollars an aunt — and is filtered through an intimate, almost folkloric storytelling style. In his early work, hand-drawn cells against painted backgrounds move by way of Scotch tape, while in recent films he has incorporated life-sized puppets. Green uses consumer software to make the final edits, and on his soundtracks he picks up a microphone to become a wild preacher, narrating outlaw poetry alongside the music of great bands like Califone and Sin Ropas, who, when Green tours with his films, play live.
Martha Colburn
The world of Martha Colburn's films combine hand painting with creepy collages, putting bones over naked folks and setting Osama down in the Wizard of Oz. Throughout the '90s she reworked images from advertising and porn into her own sinister and atmospheric work. Going beyond the use of found images, she paints Super 8 and 16mm film by hand, frame by frame, with a remarkable consistency that hints of both incredible patience and total insanity. In the last decade her films have advanced in certain old-school ways. She now uses a homemade 35mm animation stand that takes up a good part of a room, and her new work is increasingly ambitious in terms of its storytelling. She calls films like Cosmetic Emergency, Don't Kill the Weatherman! and Meet Me in Wichita "fictional documentaries;" they parlay strong political commentary within artistic and cult film aesthetics.
Janie Geiser
Janie Geiser's films are deceptively minimal. Luscious film-noir soundtracks fuel the timing of characters moving in a dance-like manner. The Fourth Watch finds its characters from inside a video screen. Immer Zu manipulates cutout figures. Using layered images, simple movements and moody light and shadow play, her sense of mystery is thick and her characters remarkably developed even though they have no moving parts. Ghostly feelings are increased by timing and symbolism — we feel the tense danger in Lost Motion yet the figures have no realistic parts. Geiser paints the backdrops and figures herself and shoots with a 16mm Bolex on a tripod, doing superimpositions inside the camera. Many times, things in the frame don't move. It's the selection of what's in the frame and the atmosphere and sound that power the films.
Don Hertzfeldt
Don Hertzfeldt, who has been nominated for an Academy Award and won the Sundance Film Festival, uses stick figures while also often changing the plotline of a film organically while he makes it. Rejected tells a tale of doomed stick men and cloudlike blobs. Everything Will Be OK captures a melancholy day with more designed figures while still being universally simple. (I think the characters have bigger dots for eyes.) We end up putting ourselves into his characters and finding a tremendous amount of drama and comedy within them. Hertzfeldt eschews computer software and instead points his film lights at paper and props. He draws or paints each frame instead of reusing cels, finding new experimental effects and storytelling tools as his filmmaking progresses.
M dot Strange
The man known as M dot Strange wowed anime and cult film audiences with his feature film We Are the Strange, the story of a boy and a girl going to get an ice cream in a cyber universe. The most technologically embracing of this group, he wrote, directed and animated his feature-length film, blending several animation styles and approaches — anime kung-fu girl, claymation, dolls, cel painting — into a goth Atari epic. His bedroom resembles a home version of a studio animator's workstation. M dot Strange has also embraced self-distribution for his Sundance-premiering feature and has toured it extensively to film centers and festivals. For his next film, Strange plans to make an even more lavish film relying on the DIY animators' version of Moore's law. "It will be completed in 2010 and the budget will be $10,000 — that's half of what it cost to make We Are the Strange," he says. "Computers have gotten faster and cheaper since then. I plan to make my $10,000 film look like a $100,000,000 film in half the time…."