PROCESS
CONCEPT
‘ZOO’ started off as an experimental project when I purchased the 16mm silent lm ‘Pet’s Corner’ without knowing the contents. I put it through the Steenbeck and it turns out it was the opening of a zoo.
‘ZOO’ became a short retelling of a child’s visit to the Zoo, where the unedited 16mm lm (what the child actually saw) merges into the scratched 16mm lm (what the child remembers) to a character animation of the animal (what the child imagines and retells.
Pattern experiments
MAKING OF
After going to London Zoo to record sounds and hearing the exaggerated stories of the children we interviewed, I was inspired to take my own perspective on the animals we saw.
The drawings are simple and childlike and the animations are fast in order to mimic the excitement and innocence of a kid reporting on an event, even if the content of the animation is rather dark.
Pet's Corner 16mm film
Scratching process
Total scratched film: 4500 frames, 3 minutes
Unedited scratched film
Total painted film: 1 min 30 seconds
Unedited painted film
Stennbeck
EXPERIMENTATION
I decided to scratch onto it in order to remove those things that you’d forget as a child; background, details, and people. The intent was to physically remove content that escapes one’s memory.
The exciting footage called for exciting colours, so I painted bright patterns onto 16mm lm in order to overlay and bring the scratched 16mm lm to life.
