Blog Assignment #5: A Statement, of Sorts.

When I was a child, I watched far, far too many Saturday morning cartoons for my own good. My impressionable mind’s eye was warped beyond the point of repair, where even today I recall memories not as they were, but in a stylized, “cartoony” sort of way: people look more like Disney characters than real human beings, animals suddenly take on exaggerated humanoid qualities, and colors appear more vividly than those in a child’s fingerpainting. In the present, if I let my eyes relax just a little than I can easily see an animated world filled with individuals brimming with untold stories. My works aren’t just funny stories set in an imaginary place; rather, they are how I see and process the world I live in.

As an urban city-dweller of New York and Los Angeles, my personal world is filled with people both known to me and those who I have never seen before. Instead of strangers to be avoided, those people sitting around me in the library—or the bus stop, or the restaurant—are characters in an animated film come to life. In both of my animated shorts, the settings are public spaces: a subway station and a coffee shop. In these spaces are individuals distinguishable enough to step forward and take over the spotlight from the main characters…but most of them are content to stay in the background and live their own lives outside the confines of my animated short.

Yet just because they can live out of frame doesn’t mean they don’t want to show up at least once in my animations. To let them is a long, masochistic process that at alternate times leaves me lovingly sketching simple motion and banging my head against the keyboard. First, they appear all over my sketchbook, waiting for their flight to arrive or reading a book on the subway, quickly etched with a .5 mechanical pencil. Then they are broken down into shapes and their greatest visible attributes are exaggerated. Several hours and 3 bottles of Coca-Cola later, they have walked three steps across the screen. It’s painful, but when the animation is finished, it’s amazing: I’ve created entire lives exactly how I see them in my head. The people on the screen are now different from the ones I’ve observed in reality, and I can control what happens to them and how they behave. And when they do interact with the funny characters and situations I did, in fact, make up, the entire creation becomes something both real and imaginary like the images inside my head; images that I can now share with others, who can enjoy them just as much as I have.