Tuesday September 27, 2005

Buzz Worthy

Animator David Daniels recently debuted a recut version of his classic short film “Buzz Box” at the Cinema Texas Short Film Festival in Austin. The original film, which debuted in 1985, was conceived as a total visual assault that mimics the blast of images projected daily by the media. As Daniels says, it’s a “hyper-hypo-micro-epic-opera of seduction and abuse, unraveling one’s threadbare sense of what’s real and what’s flash-hype in the spit-bucket of Ameri-ca-ca.”

What’s truly unique about it, however, is how it was made. Daniels used an unusual—and very time-consuming—stop-motion technique he calls Strata Cut. He demonstrated it to me a few years ago by hacking at pieces of clay with a butter knife at a Chinese restaurant in Midtown, and I’m still not sure I can explain it. Basically, it involves constructing large logs of clay with images embedded in them. The motion is produced by photographing these logs, over time, as thin layers of clay are repeatedly sliced off one end.(This diagram might help.) The effect is at once fluid and jarring.

Daniels went on to design Peter Gabriel’s video for “Big Time” and to work on M&M’s animated characters at Vinton Studios in Portland. He’s now a partner in Bent Image Lab also in Portland. The recut version of “Buzz Box”—dubbed “Buzz Box Re-Mix (Tabloid Terror)”—not only observes the film’s 20th anniversary, it has been updated for the Bush era. You can download the full nine-minute film, or one of its five chapters, here, courtesy of Daniels.