Ants And More Ants
Commission for drag performer Dykotomy (@_dykotomy_)
I’d always wanted to try a direct interaction between the screen and the performer in front of it…
…and doing it with stop-motion was a dream come true. By the end of it, I was viewing this more as a collage than an animation.
I really didn't know what it would all become when I started; all we knew was that we wanted Dykotomy to be manipulated directly by the giant hands. That meant a lot of close coordination between what I was doing with the animation, and what Tommy was doing on stage-- which was new territory for me!
The original plan for this act was to make it more of an explicit collage with all cut-paper elements, but given the constraints on time and the key choreo moments that were crucial to hit at just the right moment I opted for a more typical construction for the hands. They are a mix of aluminum wire, rope/cord, paint, and paper, with aluminum bones so I could quickly create the poses I needed.
Each stop-motion element was shot on green screen and then brought into clips of footage from the actual documentary that Dykotomy used for his audio. I treated the footage with a *lot* of composites from light leaks and other elements to give it a more deteriorated look, and then I also took the paper I'd used for the puppets and some other patterns and used those as textural punctuation. For each "impact" moment with the hands I shot a few different lighting conditions, to make those moments land a bit more harshly.
There was so much experimentation for this project; we didn't know the exact dimensions of the screen before I had to get started, and so I had to do a bit of napkin math and hope they'd all line up. Dykotomy and I rehearsed together, brainstormed how the choreography would align, and then I used a recording of her choreo as a sort of registration guide for the hands while I was animating.