SURE MAN - Big Head Has Spoken
Commission for drag performer SHERMAN (@restingclownface)
Performed/shown at the Mosessian Center for the Arts
I never thought I’d take part in a cross between Tom of Finland, Terry Gilliam, and Zardoz…
…But, then again, my favorite projects tend to be ones with references and influences that surprise me. For an act whose starting point was “Zardoz-as-queer-icon-and-fashion-couture” where I found myself at the end was head-deep into an exploration of the relationship between military aesthetic and queer culture.
I had a delightful time dancing between different media and materials. SHERMAN themself is a collage of a performer— a renowned camp king who uplifts alt drag, a loving wrestler dedicated to safe spaces, a clown who can make you weep for beauty. It felt fitting for this video to also exist in the liminal space between influences.
I used a mix of techniques here— some stop-motion, some keyframing, and lots of digital collaging. The backgrounds for each of the three scenes that made up this animation were collaged from the film, and retouched/embellished digitally to make them suitable to animate with.
The Big Head was a 3D print which I prepped, painted and animated using stop-motion in front of a green screen. This was then composited into the collaged scenes, and everything was animated digitally (in the case of the Head, supplemental to the stop-motion).
The collage-y nature of this project allowed me to slip in a couple easter eggs from past projects— the streetlamps in the third scene are actually a lantern I built for a different project. A number of elements that made up the middle scene were references to Manowar album covers, since that band was used in the performance mix and also was a sort of template for the kind of “utra-masculine-yet-childish” aesthetic we were trying to arrive at.