Aug 13, 2013

Kevin Eskew's "Dumb Day"

The Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival was made possible by sponsor JibJab and its strong support of emerging filmmakers.

A nine-and-a-half-minute piece of experimental student animation is a daunting proposition on most days, but not so with Kevin Eskew's "Dumb Day." This short, produced by DePaul University's fledgling animation program, is the most experimental work presented at Cartoon Brew's Student Animation Festival.

"Dumb Day" is difficult to describe. Just as Robert Breer's masterpiece "A Man and His Dog Out for Air" took a familiar activity as its starting point, so too does this film take a man's everyday activities as its starting point, but "Dumb Day" deconstructs the minutiae of everyday life and reconfigures them into a comic, cosmic journey.

It is even more difficult to describe its humor, but there are moments of great laughter throughout. My personal favorite is at the 2:20 minute mark, when a mysterious bulbous object drops onto the screen. Soon a second bulbous object falls, each with its own distinctive creaking sound. Then, a nose with two ridiculously large nostrils pops out from between the bulbous objects, which we recognize as cheeks. The noses inflate as quickly as a deflated balloon when sniffing a flower in a vase. Never has the simple act of sniffing a flower been so transcendently expressed in animation.

Eskew's style is fresh and different. It falls somewhere between the stout style of the late Philip Gaston and a certain school of contemporary indie comics. Dame Day's sound design is as astonishing as its visual elements, with music and sound effects enhancing every moment of this unique animated work.

Continue reading filmmaker Kevin Eskew's comments:

The film came together around drawing. Originally, there was a more ambitious storyline, both sci-fi and HGTV-like, about a man who eats furniture and reassembles it within himself. But as I began to understand the drawings, what really worked was a simple domestic routine dragged into anger, with little plot. It allowed me to open up the piece, but I think the feeling of the original story is still there.

Mostly BIC #2 mechanical pencils. The pencil drawings on paper were scanned, edited & composited in After Effects.

Quickly the drawings are imported into the computer to a rough timeline. I think I underestimated how much of any film is created in the editing process. I didn't use storyboards in the strict sense of the word and let the details dictate the pacing. Some of my favorite images came unexpectedly that way, but only when I put these bits and pieces together do I see the larger shape of the film, and connections and ideas that I may have missed at first.

James Duesing, Jim Trainor, Jun Wada, Suzan Pitt, and Sally Cruickshank are my favorites. When I first embarked on this project, I had just bought a book of Pascal Dulli's comics, which I carried around with me from place to place. Along the way, I listened to several Raymond Chandler audiobooks and a lot of Joe Frank's radio show.

Hopefully, we were hunched over a light box somewhere, smoking cigars. I hate to say it, but I need to find a way to keep making short animated films. Preferably in collaboration with a group of like-minded neechan.

KevinEskew.org [23]