For one night only, seven animators will bring to life a seven-minute “Exquisite Corpse” film for the Pioneer Square Art Walk on Thursday, March 1.
Starting at 8 p.m., a continuous loop of animated short clips created by members of the Seattle Experimental Animation Team (SEAT) will be projected onto one of the large windows at Zeitgeist Coffee, 171 S. Jackson St. (Other animators not necessarily affiliated with SEAT will also show their work on screens, windows and flying cinema kites at Zeitgeist.)
For the “Re-Animated: Exquisite Corpse” film, each animator drew a slip of paper with predetermined prompts that would be the beginning and ending images of the individual clips, which would then be edited together to form the continuous loop of film.
Each had a month to complete the clip, and none of the animators knew the others’ prompts, which included a man with a beard, a bouncing ball, an open refrigerator, a girl with a Hula-Hoop, a plate of pasta, a sleeping cat and a flying kite.
“It’ll be interesting to see how we interpreted the prompts,” said Beacon Hill animator Tess Martin, who used sand for her contribution to the film.
Phinney Ridge artist Stefan Gruber’s animated clip shows brush-stroked water drying on a piece of paper, while Capitol Hill’s Salise Hughes manipulated found images and erased portions of them in each frame for hers.
Other participating artists include Haller Lake’s Otto Bulut, Capitol Hill’s Webster Crowell, Seward Park’s Eric Ostrowski and Fremont’s Clyde Petersen.
Though “Exquisite Corpse” films are usually done for visual art, with one filmmaker completing a segment before turning it over to the next filmmaker, Hughes explained, SEAT’s “is a similar concept, but we changed it so everyone could work on it at the same time.”
Having worked on a similar project through the Northwest Film Forum that required 20 prompts, Hughes said she knew what prompts would work well with “Exquisite Corpse” films.
“Simple prompts can be interpreted many different ways,” she said. “They’re not stagnant images that connects them.”
Animation can be time-consuming, Martin said, but all the SEAT animators “are all quite attached to stop-motion animation. We really understand the advantages of it, as opposed to [those of] computer animation.”
SEAT’s “Exquisite Corpse” film will also be screened along with other works by SEAT members during the “Fanning the Flames” series premiere hosted by Clyde Petersen. It will take place on the same evening as the Pioneer Square Art Walk, starting at 5 p.m. at Northwest Film Forum, 15151 12th Ave. While admission to this event is free, this show is for adults only due to its sexual content.
After that evening, the “Re-Animated Exquisite Corpse” film will show in different capacities throughout the year, Martin said.
[[In-content Ad]]