Backyard Shadow

Reality is on the blink again in Backyard Shadow. © Karl Staven.

 Backyard Shadow is an abstract short starring some trees, a brick wall and our sun. Starting from some ultra-hi-res digital pictures shot outdoors at intervals of several seconds or minutes, director Karl Staven kept his camera stationary and then imported the frames into After Effects, panning, zooming and spinning to create movement.

Because the spindly trees on which he focuses for most of the short are bare of leaves, and absent any wind, the only thing moving from shot to shot as the afternoon wears on is the shadow of the tree on the wall, making possible some serious digital reality-warping. First Staven plays some simple time-axis tricks, rocking the image forwards and backwards in time while panning steadily on diagonals across the frame. Then the branches themselves start to break up the frame into independent areas of time/space, with their geometry defining little irregular polygons where shadows are moving out of sync with their neighbors. In one shot even individual bricks in the wall start to pixillate, shimmering in a variety of light and dark textures.

As a study in trickfilm technique, it’s fascinating; the only distraction is the editing, which purports to turn something narrative-free into high drama by Mickey-Mousing the cuts and camera moves to the beats of Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8. In a yard where a tree has been cut down, there is drama of a sort, but not exactly like this.

Rich, famous and socially responsible: My Life at 40. © Laurie Hill.

My Life at 40 Personal writing left over from grammar school can be a rich source of embarrassment, but it’s also a brutally efficient means of personal archaeology: a fossilized layer of personality revealing the obsessions that drove a life and, more often than not, still do. Endearing misconceptions about the way the world works stare out from looseleaf paper alongside some wonderfully immature ideas on success, all suffused with an overarching need to get rich (a recurring theme particularly common with those of us who were passing notes during the Reagan/Thatcher years). Animator Laurie Hill, age 34, has recently recycled and reinterpreted a piece of future prognostication written by his 12-year-old former self about his future self, age 40: My Life at 40.

Laurie recruited his father Denys to read the text, which he delivers without guile like any parent might recite his child’s schoolwork before hanging it on the fridge. “Name: Laurie Hill. Age: 40 years. Occupation: Conservationist and world authority on the Anglerfish.” In black and white, old doodles and text fragments from Laurie’s grammar-school memo book come to life, replicate themselves and eventually burst out into the real world as paper cutouts. “Hopefully, I will be as rich as possible,” the narration portends, as a paper Italian sportscar zooms down a real street, “driving a Lamborghini Countach LP400S, and running my own wildlife reserve…”

As After Effects-manipulated cutouts dart and sway on-screen like flats in a shadowbox play, the boy with his father’s voice explains just how he intends to get rich and famous by saving the world. While managing his own specially-built aquarium and wildlife park, he’ll nevertheless find time to globetrot to faraway jungles to snatch up exotic species, “to sell to other conservation projects, and also to stock my own captive breeding program.” The music, a lugubrious rendition of Mahler’s 5th Symphony, enforces the seriousness of mind of the 12-year-old even as it complements the seriously fucked-up implications of the child’s make-believe.

His imaginary captive breeding facility appears here as a row of street-level cages like an urban detention center, where long poles push animals together rhythmically in forced copulation -- first in breeder pairs of matched species, and then in mismatched panther-monkey combinations, and finally in a giant orgy of stacked endangered critters -- all forcibly reproducing as their nattily-dressed human benefactor looks on.

When it comes to Hill’s childhood ideas of conspicuous consumption, I know all too well where he’s coming from. (I too slobbered over that Lamborghini -- mine had a spoiler though.) My Life at 40 is dreamlike and disconcerting, not just in how Hill takes his prepubescent fantasies to their logical conclusion, but in how the older animator interjects some fantasy elements that the 12-year-old either couldn’t name or wouldn’t admit to coveting in the original text -- particularly a group of full-chested dreamgirls in bikinis, rising in colonies out of the swamp like some imaginary Crocodilis Sexybeastius.

Hill, who made My Life at 40 as his first-year project for an Animation M.A. at London’s Royal College of Art, actually recently made good on his youthful dreams of conservation… right after finishing this short, he produced a cutout-style promo for World Wildlife Fund. “My Life at 40 describes my desire to become a conservation hero by the age of 40,” he notes, “and so this felt like it was a step in the right direction!”

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. He is also an actor, although work is scarce, mainly due to his insistence on ending every line of dialogue with the phrase, “And I haven’t been paid to say that.”

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