Sundance Channel recently sat down for an interview with Kris Lefcoe, the director of TINY RIOT PROJECT. What started as a music video for a small Canadian band ended up installed at some of the most prestigious art galleries and venues in the world suck as Art Basel Miami, Havana Biennale, and Galerie Tomas Schulte Berlin. Watch TINY RIOT PROJECT at Sundance Channel’s Digital Shorts.
What was the inspiration for TINY RIOT PROJECT?
Lefcoe : A few years ago I had a vision of an army of Care Bears and Coppertone girls attacking kids. I wanted to re-contextualize these sweet and cuddly icons as a bastion of corporate power. I ended up dropping the Coppertone girls and going for more of the Saturday morning cartoon plushies.
Why did you choose stop motion over other forms of animation, even live action?
Lefcoe : Stop motion is just so charming, so endearing. The viewer is drawn into this magical world, it’s irresistible. So it was the perfect medium, a surprising juxtaposition with the violence and political critique in the film. But it’s dangerously addictive. After shooting it, I wanted to shoot everything in stop motion.
Cardboard creatures roams a foreboding urban landscape in this awesome stop-motion video created by Sjors Vervoort for a student graduation animation project. Well done, kid. The style does remind me of the past work of famous street artist Blu who I previously mentioned.
Matilda Tristram created this whimsical and playful stop-motion animated music video for band Omo. Playing with food never seemed so fun! I especially like the jump roping meatball.
Female street artist Yseult aka “YZ,” pronounced as “Eyes,” created this meditative stop motion video “Still Alive” of blues icon BB King animated from almost 70 street posters. For more information on this artist check out this interview.
This short by Michael Hickox would be right in the middle of a Venn diagram overlapping LEGO, classic arcade games, and stop motion video, which are three popular trends lately in the blogosphere.
The great stop-motion video below was the senior project of a Savannah College of Art and Design student named Bang-yao Liu. The music is by one of my favorite groups, the Norwegian electronica duo Royksopp:
Laika, a Soviet astro-dog earned the distinction of being the first mammal to go up in space and orbit the earth in 1957. She was also the first casualty of the space program. On a more upbeat note, Laïka is also a spirited and spunky promo video created by Guillaume Blanchet to celebrate the 10 anniversary of a popular bar in Montreal by the same name. This video had me sold: I’m planning on visiting this bar when I’m in Montreal at the end of July. Here’s some behind-the-scenes tidbits in this short interview with Blanchet.
Let there be light! An opened case unleashes the proverbial Pandora’s box in this video that blends stop-motion animation with light drawing. Relatedly, check out the Flickr group for other light drawings.
Beshart, a visual communication studio, created this stop-motion animation of headphones doing some synchronized dancing in this fun video, which was created with 1500 photographs taken over 3 days.
Chris Gavin’s experimental stop-motion film, TXT ISLAND. Painstakingly hand-crafted using hundreds of plastic peg-board letters over several months, this little gem follows the endeavors of a squad of letters, as they delve deep into the jungle of a mysterious island. Gavin is one of the several extremely talented award-winning directors from TANDEM, an innovative animation studio based in London, UK.
