Jason Sondhi
The Seattle International Film Festival wound down this weekend and as part of the festivities the programmers put together a screening of the festival’s favorite short films. I don’t go out of my way to follow the festival circuit, it’s too heartbreaking when you run a site like this and you wait and wait for your newest favorite film to finish touring the endless festivals so it can come home to the net, only to be disappointed time and again. But on the web or in those nostalgic relics known as “theaters”, Andrew and I genuinely do like short film, so we stopped by to see what was up. Sometimes festival short programs are hit and miss, (I suffered through a decided miss just a weekend earlier) but this one was money, not a dud in the bunch.
I went home and googled, dutifully looking out for all of you, our beloved fledgling audience, but of course none of the short films were to be found. None except for the Animation Grand Jury Prize winning Photograph of Jesus! Hoo-Raaaaay.
Photograph for Jesus is of that weird genre hybrid, the animated documentary. Ryan or I Met the Walrus are examples in this mode, using recorded audio as the basis for the narrative. In this film an unseen photographic curator relates some of the odd and sometimes just plain daft requests he gets while working at the archive. We all get a chuckle via simple storytelling as he recounts his surprise, disbelief and exasperation at some of the things folk are looking for, while images catalogued in the vast wharehouse come to life via an impressive diversity of animation techniques. My personal favorite is the story of someone wanting an actual photograph of a Yeti.
The content of the short is heavily influenced by the reason for its creation. In 2008 Getty Images put on a contest for filmmakers, asking them to create a short film in which no less than 50% of the imagery was comprised of material from their London-based Hulton archive. Using image archives for the raw material in which to animate films is a neat idea and so far has produce some dynamite work—Run Wrake’s Control Master being the other example that comes to mind, but Laurie Hill took the premise of the contest and cleverly turned it in upon itself, creating a film out of the archive that itelf comments on the archive.
The Getty’s contest page displays some of the other worthy entries, including one by SotW-featured Ian Mackinnon, but Photograph of Jesus is the undisputed cream in my mind, only partly because of its perfection as a commercial. The film is also a delight of animation. It comes at a furious clip and blends photographic manipulation with collage, including a few instance of a bizarre but interesting kaleidoscopic montage, as well as stop motion of the physical space housing the collection. It’s visually arresting stuff, and the madcap feel of the action is a nice complement to the dry humor of the British narration.
Like most short filmed goodness on the web, our man Dek already scooped the film well before us, so visit if you want a personal copy.