Hongqiu Wang

The Animate Matter Film- Afterpieces

Studying the Street of Crocodiles animation left us fascinated about the existing sense of time as materiality. This inspired us (Petros Tsifoutidis) to produce an animation film that also contained material depth as well as interest. We came to a mutual agreement to look for old and remarkable objects that could be part of the filming. As a result, we found two objects, one being a 1950s Czechoslovakian radio

and another was a 1930s clock. Although these two objects were not working, they both had complex internal mechanisms whereby the clock had had mechanical parts, and the radio had electrical part. For both objects, the mechanisms were securely hidden and only visible once the back cover was removed. The fact that the internal components were hidden and could only be revealed after removing the back cover was the reason the objects were selected because it is similar to one of the features in Street of Crocodiles.

This gave the animation the best starting point, the material or rather the object or the matter. The film would therefore focus on animating the matter. This would be achieved by articulating a general approach to dismantling both objects. The outcome of this was still unknown. Just like with the Quay brothers, we did not have a particular script, and we let the content be guided by the materiality of the film. What directed the way the components of the radio and the clock would be dismantled was they felt and appeared. This made the creative process very intuitive, and the last scene came after the dismantling of both objects, which made it the only scene that had a planned setting. For the shadows of the removed components to be captured by a camera beneath them through an opaque surface, they were placed on a glass-lined with tracing paper. We ensured that the digital editing of all the captured images was in line with what had been physically captured.