My short animated video Domestikia, Chapter 3: La Petite Mort has been selected to screen at the Boston Underground Film Festival 2014. Tentative screening date is Thursday, March 27th (check the festival web site after March 11th to confirm dates & times). If you’re in the Boston/Cambridge area, check it out!
My installation The Disobedient Dollhouse will be featured in the curated group show Blueprints at Hamilton’s Centre 3 for Print and Media Arts. This exhibition will also screen my two recent animated videos Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery and Domestikia, Chapter 3, La Petite Mort. Show runs from January 17 – March 1, 2014. The opening reception will take place Friday, February 14 at 7 – 10 p.m.
An animated logo for my brand, Papercut Pictures. The logo emphasizes my low-fi, anti-realist and “anti-slick” aesthetic and approach to both paper cutouts and stop-motion animation. I also wanted to stress the vintage style that my films often possess. The butterfly, one of my repeating motifs, makes a brief appearance.
A tale of love, betrayal and one vengeful butterfly. This project was inspired by the surreal animations of Lenica, Borowyck and Svankmajer, Japanese tentacle erotica, and those strange, middle-of-the-night dreams one has after spicy food.
Story, artwork and articulated paper puppets created by Jennifer Linton.
Stop-motion animation by Carla Veldman.
Original musical score by Zev Farber.
Directed & edited by Jennifer Linton.
This animation was made possible by the financial support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council. Copyright ©2013 Papercut Pictures (Jennifer Linton). All rights reserved.
Hello gentle readers. It’s been over a month since I last wrote in this blog, and I felt that I should share with you what has been preoccupying my time. As some of you may know, I’ve been working in the medium of stop-motion animation these past few months. Animation has a tendency to devour time like a hungry little baby, and my new animation is a greedy baby, indeed. Now, before I get too ahead of myself, allow me to backtrack a bit.
Back in October, I lamented over the large amount of time and effort required to properly prepare a media artist grant application. I wrote that “[the grant application] is a long, tedious, and painful process that I submit to only grudgingly.” However, as the old axiom goes “you get out of life what you put in”, and this past exercise in painful tedium was no exception to this rule. I received both media artist grants to which I applied. There’s a reason why old axioms are old: they’re generally true.
Above is a “quick & dirty” test I worked on today for one of my new paper puppets. And by “quick”, I mean that it took me several hours to produce those 7 seconds. This is a rough, and by no means a finished work. Lots of pop and flicker in the lights. There is no audio.
Video still from “Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery” by Jennifer Linton, 2:01 minutes, 2012.
My short animated film Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery will be screened next month during the 2nd Winter edition of the King Street Alternative Film & Video Festival. According to the festival’s blog, they’ve programmed over 35 films & videos over the 8th and 9th of February (2013), ranging from the very short to over 20-minutes in length. The event is held at Betty’s, that stalwart Corktown staple located directly across from the Toronto Sun building on an otherwise desolate stretch of King Street East. The beer and nachos at Betty’s are glorious, and the evening should prove fun and entertaining. Come on out and support your local, indie filmmakers!
Film still from “Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery”, 2012, stop-motion animation done with paper cutouts and puppets.
It’s official. My animated short film Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery has been selected under the International category for Animaldiçoados/Animacursed 2012, a film festival in Rio de Janeiro that features horror, suspense, and “other cursed” genres of animation. Mine is probably under the “other cursed” or possibly the “WTF” category, should they have one of those.
Visit the festival web site (in Portuguese, of course) and check out the selected films. Pretty solid programming! Amazingly enough, I’m sharing screen time with Julia Pott (see my last blog entry When I grow up, I want to make films like Julia). Not sure how that happened.
No, seriously. This animated short film by Julia Pott, entitled Belly, is a phenomenal achievement. Visually stunning, disturbing, and poignant. I could continue slathering on the superlatives, but you can see for yourself. Official Selection for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
Belly from Julia Pott on Vimeo.
Domestikia: The Incident in the Nursery. from Jennifer Linton on Vimeo.
At last, I’ve completed my second stop-motion animated short film. Domestikia uses paper cutouts and articulated paper puppets in a stop-motion animation to explore the strange, dreamlike and uncanny realm of the Domestic Gothic. With a healthy dose of black humour, it tackles the anxieties and challenges experienced by parents of young children. The ‘Domestic Gothic’ as a motif developed through the writing of 19th-century women Gothic novelists, such as the Brontë Sisters, and dealt specifically with the horror of confinement felt by women who were ‘imprisoned’ within the home and unable to move freely in Victorian society. With contemporary women still predominantly acting as primary caregivers to their children — and thus financially penalized by either remaining at home or opting for employment that allows for ‘family friendly’ work hours — this sense of confinement is still present. The realm of the domestic has become infiltrated by strange creatures — a giant butterfly, an octopus, and bird-headed children — whose presence suggest a level of discomfort within the home. These creatures are the physical manifestation of Freud’s das Unheimlich (translates to English as ‘the uncanny’), a term which literally means ‘unhomely.’
All images and animation were done by me, in my basement.
Lady Lazarus 