Friday, January 12, 2007

Jared Dubrino on "SONIA"


"The process of making the images for Sonia developed over time. Initially, there were a series of drawings and still photos and simple collages that were created by Lucy. She tried to maintain the feeling and some of the style of Sonia's collage work. As time went on, technology caught up with her vision, and Lucy and I spoke of creating work that Sonia might have created had she had Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut Pro.

Just as Sonia longed to get away from the surface, to add depth and space to her works (which is what led her to glass) so did we also want to move away from flat images with simple pans and zooms.

By using the "Z" axis, the 3rd dimension available to us in After Effects, we were able to create a 3D world where the different 2D images could live and move. Just as Sonia did in her own work, we used existing photographs of the characters, extracting them from their surroundings (using photoshop instead of scissors or blades), then mixing them with found images of objects and environments. This was all then animated and given life with After Effects.

We also had original images specially created for us by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, pen-and-ink drawings as well as collages that were based on Sonia's own work, where situations involving the characters were recreated. George Griffin led the way with his animations using these techniques, and then Matthew and I built upon that style, eventually animating the better part of the film. Todd Sines of Scale+ then created the custom animated fonts, each based on the Cyrillic text of Sonia's environment. These text treatments added the final "icing," bringing even more spirit of Sonia's times and works to our film."

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