Sep 23, 2013

Isabella dos Santos "i"

The Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival is made possible by our sponsor JibJab and their strong support for up-and-coming filmmakers.

Cartoon Brew's annual Student Animation Festival has screened seven amazing student films to date. Today, we are pleased to present the eighth premiere, a film by Isabella dos Santos, a student in the CalArts Experimental Animation Program. Dos Santos' film is the final premiere of the 2013 Student Animation Festival, so it is a bittersweet moment, but we are proud to close the festival with such a truly unique animation experience.

"I" uses hand-drawn animation and live-action dance to ask the eternal question, "Who am I?" Surrounding the flesh-and-blood dancers is a delicate, indefinite figure composed of stark lines. Representations of the fragmented psyche, animated and human, intersect with each other throughout the film, attempting to reconcile into a unified whole.

The choreography of these two figures forms the basis of the film, and the details of their interaction represent a type of magic that can only exist on film. Dos Santos' multidisciplinary approach required collaboration with dancer Yanina Orellana for the choreography and performance, and singer Kate Davis, each of whom makes a special contribution to the final product. [In 2011, I was selected for a scholarship program called YoungArts. I was an animator, and part of the program was to bring together young people from all arts disciplines, ages 15-18, for a week at a time to create an interdisciplinary performance. I grew up dancing, but being with other YoungArts kids made me realize that there is more to art and people than working in a windowless room with my back straight and creating animations. Attending those performances warmed my heart and made me fuzzy. I began attending CalArts that fall, and after such an experience, I became frustrated with trying to "just be an animator". I don't know about you, but I wanted more than what was in front of me, and I had images in my head of dancing with imaginary monsters. Story-wise, I was always an identity-crisis kind of girl, in the dilemma of "I'm perceived as an animator, but I really want to be a person who moves and dances. In other words, that's not all there is to it, but you'll have to watch and interpret the rest.

The choreography and original performance were done with a CalArts dance student, Yanina Orellana. We worked on the dance before the animation and filmed it in the dance theater at CalArts using a Canon T1i. Then I taped a peg bar to the edge of my laptop and traced the main frames of her performance on paper. I used that as a reference for timing and general positioning, but everything was done in pencil on paper. Paper cuts and graphite-stained hands are very challenging. The final animation was composited onto the video using Adobe After Effects.

It was difficult to know what to fix. I wanted to improve my technique and the emotion of my work, but I was overwhelmed by the far-fetched possibilities. And I was always hotly confused when I tried to express my love/hate conflicts about identity. There were a lot of confusing conversations that semester anyway. But animating the dance was a great tool, and the choreography did all the work as far as timing. I love how animation brings out something organic and instinctive when you're not looking, and this scenario encouraged that. And I learned that dance and animation can be combined in this way. Even if I didn't get it perfect, it mattered to me.

While animating, I watched all the dance documentaries available on Netflix. I couldn't get enough of the bloody ballerina toes (just kidding). Norman McLaren, of course, was very encouraging to watch, whether it was the simple yet expressive scratch-on-film line quality or the treatment of dance in the pas de deux. It felt good to stay in the realm of the early animation pioneers. It reminded me to do what it takes to tell an honest story instead of trying to wow people with technology. It was around that time that I wrote many essays linking dance and animation, and I began to really value the humanity of movement and expression through movement across both media. I remembered why it meant so much to me to see animation as dance and to merge the two media. And I continued to take dance classes.

Five years later, I may still be bouncing around the animation world. As I said before, there is more to art and life for me. I'm also good at live performance, scrimming animations like holograms on stage. It's a lot of fun. I do a lot of stage and animation work, a lot of arts advocacy and government work, a lot of writing, a lot of animation work that's not dance related. But it's all fun, independent or collaborative, art making "as participation in a world of ideas". I want to continue to appreciate it that way. It feels good to do so.

BLOG: BelaDosSantos.blogspot.com VIDEO: Vimeo.com/BelaDosSantos