July 6th 2010
Image: Max Sorensen in animating a clay monkey.
Recently, on a sultry June day I sat in a friends’ barn, made hotter by an array of large movie lights, pushing a camera along a makeshift dolly a millimeter at a time in the effort to make a clay monkey have the illusion of yawning. Max Sorensen is an impressive video artist who specializes in stop motion animation. He’s adapted a portion of the family barn into a film studio while his brother, Luke, builds Saab rally cars below. I’d sought out Max’s expertise to help me experiment with the animation of a painting I’d done.
My thought was to use stop motion animation to reveal hidden elements of my painting’s implied motion. The painting shows a man falling through the air while airplanes ascend around him. The painting refers to the common dream of falling that can wake us up with an abrupt alarm. One theory is that this dream is actually a remnant of our evolutionary history. At the time that our simian ancestors ascended into the trees, predators were eluded but the dangers of falling became a substantial cause of death. It’s suggested that this falling dream is a mechanism to keep one from falling out of one’s perch while nodding off. I wanted to depict this innate fear of falling juxtaposed with our aspirations for flight.
The film we are shooting shows a monkey falling asleep on his jungle tree limb and dreaming of the falling. The animated versions of the man and airplanes dissolve into the actual still painting. Stop motion animation is a cinematic process wherein the movement of objects is simulated by slight manipulations between each still frame of the film. Current film is viewed at 24 frames a second, and in stop motion, each of those frames needs to be calculated to produce an effective illusion. Max works primarily in the tradition of claymation, exploiting the inherent plasticity of clay to animate his subjects. The clay adds a certain handmade charm to the movement. While he shoots digitally and uses current computer programs to organize the footage, his projects require constant hands on attention and creative problem solving of physical dilemmas.
Planning out an animated sequence takes shrewdness to envision the complex paths that motion takes but also a whimsy to embrace the medium. Max shoots his models at a small scale and takes great care to make sure his shots feel fluid and real. This takes a rare precision and patience. I often think that painting is a slow artform, but after taking eleven hours to shoot about ten seconds I think the mantle for slowness definitely belongs to animation. The ratio of lengthy production to short product promotes a certain perfectionism to make sure the hard work pays off. The magic of bringing things to life cannot be done frivolously!
In the mid 18th century Luigi Galvani applied Allesandero Volta’s inventions of the early battery to test his theories on the presence of electricity in the animal body. Galvani applied electric charges to a frog’s corpse and observed the muscles amazingly appear to regain their life. The young author, Mary Shelly was keenly interested in these incredible experiments. Churning in her subconscious, the subject of reanimation triggered a dream of a hulking human cadaver stirring to life under the influence of some strange machinery. Then, at a Swiss retreat, in response to a challenge to create a ghost story, Shelly shaped this dream into the classic gothic horror, Frankenstein.
The difficulty of imagining or accepting the prospect of death leads humans to speculate about immortality. But the dream of defeating death is shadowed by the fear of death’s impermanence. In effect, we fear that our wishes to escape death might actually been granted and the dead would awaken. This is in part what Shelly’s masterpiece is about; that striving to achieve the impossible can create a monster. It is also the cause of our shudder while passing by a department store manikin.
As in the cliché of a portrait whose eyes seem to follow the spectator around the room, I’ve often thought of painting as a sort of necromancy that tries to animate substances to life. This happens in several ways—by arranging the fluid medium of pigment and oil to simulate a living reality and in the eye of the spectator who reawakens that life in the painting by looking at it. The illusion of motion and experience in painting is a phenomenon by which I’ve been greatly fascinated. Painting and animation toy with the desire for immortality and spark the imagination as a result. I’m eager to see what phantasmagoric monster is made by mixing the two.
Max’s videos can be viewed at www.maxwellsorensen.com and our collaboration will be posted to www.themagpie.org when it has been completed.