About this project

I started making animations because I was drawing and painting too much and had no place to put all the stuff coming down. It was a sort of Nicorette gum patch for excessive artistic enthusiasm. The animations started as a way to further cover movement in my drawing and painting and gradually found a narrative path. The story line was often a flow of consciousness over music and movement of pen or brush, drawing like dancing. I started to use my own voice to narrate certain things I felt behind the drawings. This became a formula for producing freestyle animations that have a spontaneous and simple expressive nature, like a good story from a friend or a conversation at the bus stop. Recently I have been collaborating with young English poet Mathew Gregory. We met in Naples, Italy and had quite a few discussions, a lot of ideas exchanged. I told him a few stories about my life and he later transformed them up in a two part poem about father and son.

I would like to take this exchange even further by animating Mathew’s sequence of poems in a high quality film fit for big screen projection. Mathew’s poems are based on some of my accounts about my old neighborhood; ice skating across the lake and my father’s wedding in a historic local cinema. The father and son relationship as perceived by Mathew will be balanced out by my own reflections and sensibilities while drawing out these events from my memory. I would like to challenge the role of the father and son and introduce the universal role of the friendship by way of a spontaneous collaboration and cross cultural reflection on families or memories of thier special places. The final step of this project will be a premiere showing of the film on the big screen of the historic cinema where my father was married, a place never seen or experienced  by the English poet Mathew, except in the form of story telling, explained by a new friend on some old steps in Naples, a fraction of how me and my father lived on the North East side of a far away city.  This memory was transformed by simple conversation, then poetry, then by the idea of collaboration, which could lead to thousands of drawings and a then a film that will be premiered at its very root, in the old cinema where the story starts and ends.

To create this film it will be necessary as in past projects to draw my ass off and to purchase a computer willing and able to process high definition images, a suitable  camera will also be neccessary to take such images. The general mission is to acquire enough quality pixels for the big screen in order to show the film at the North East side cinema where my father was married.  The process is very involved, I usually produce up to 1000 drawings on standard A4 copy paper in order to have 5 minutes of animation.  These single frames are very precious and elaborate, like a single moment caught on paper, these original frames will be offered as a prize and I won't send the ones that just say "the end" or  a door closing.  I want to make a product that is really involved in an artistic and personal dialouge about fathers, sons and the stories we tell to keep us closer.  Hopefully all the drawings will reflect this intent and in making the film we will get even closer to the perfect and sublime expression of passionate conversation between friends, family, mediums and line.