Over the last four years, Jonathan Dueck has scratched, painted on, stamped over, and projected old 16mm films. For "In Transit," he collaborated with artists and musicians I Heart Lung, Chad VanGaalen, Deneir, and Son Lux to create 20 short videos from the 16mm films with a beautiful accompanying soundtrack. You can view selections from the project here, and below you'll find some insights into his process.



KICKSTARTER: You must have had to paint a lot of film. Can you tell us about the techniques you used? Did you paint in painstakingly small bits or did you splatter paint everywhere? How calculated or random are the results?

DUECK: The results are a fine balance between the two. Typically I would roll out about 5 feet of film, draw or scratch the first layer, and then work it up like you would a painting. The whole time visualizing what it would look like on the screen in motion. So often it would start out very spontaneous and then I would build up the layers in a more deliberate manner.



KICKSTARTER: You focus on making art collaborative; you had several artists and musicians join you in creating 16mm. What was the process like in piecing together all of the elements of 16mm?

DUECK: It was a really exciting process that surprised me at every stage. Each participating musician responded in such unique and incredible ways. And each one brought out really specific things in the images and sometimes even made me aware of things that I didn't know were there. Each time I would get some audio back from an artist it would deepen my relationship with the visuals and refresh my energy for creating new ones. Chad VanGaalen's pieces really illustrated the fast movement and the flicker of the films. I Heart Lung somehow made the short, lo-fi films into grand epic landscapes. Deneir captured the implied violence and dread that came with the actual manipulation of the films in their creation. Son Lux showed me how beautiful and moving the films actually were.

Each artist responded in their own way and pace, so it kept me on my toes and nothing ever became formulaic. I loved working this way and am really happy with how it all turned out! I couldn't have chosen better collaborators.

"Little Brass Bird" is a stop-motion web series set in a magical clock shop. The stars of the show, played by two plush toy characters named Robin and Rhoderick, are fighting to save their humble little clock shop from encroaching corporations and modern development.

When the real-life Robin and Rhoderick brought their series to Kickstarter, they did a superb job building a community of supporters and bringing people into their creative process, offering custom plush toys modeled after backers that ended up becoming so much more.

Robin and Rhoderick shared with us a few insights into the origins of "Little Brass Bird":

A huge part of Little Brass Bird's charm are the delightful handmade plush toys who are the stars! How long have you been making these toys, and when did you realize that they had an important story to tell?

Although we both come from very different artistic backgrounds, our fateful meeting while working for Shawnimals, LLC. in 2006 was the real beginning of Little Brass Bird. Many of the stories, characters and jokes told in our episodes are loosely based on experiences we've shared together through the years. Thus, our look-a-like dolls and real names play as the main characters along with our cats; Lego, Jack and Chibi.

Many of our trademark characters, like Half Cat, were first manifested as doodles in college note books. After re-discovering our notebooks years later, these doodles started developing as we discussed silly stories involving our drawings.

In 2007 Robin began to write a children’s book based on an anthropomorphic clock shop involving our doodle characters but never finished. We decided to take the characters from her unfinished book and turn them into a line of plush toys. However, after several craft shows and events including Depart-Ment and Pitchfork Music Festival, we found that many people liked the designs but couldn't commit to buying the characters partly because they didn't know what they were. That's when a fire lit in our bellies. By combining Rhodrick's film experience with Robin's character designs and combining our real life stories with our characters' silly imaginary stories; we decided to create a web series featuring each of our characters one episode at a time.

You did such a fantastic job of bringing backers into the experience of Little Brass Bird through your rewards and updates. Did backers end up helping shape your overall creative vision?

The success of our Kickstarter project has helped inspire us. However, we didn’t fully realize the potential of the show until we began designs for the $200 pledge custom plushes. After conversing with backers through email, we received a plethora of information to create caricatures of their looks and personalities that could fit in the show. In fact, the custom designs were so fun and interesting that we decided to make the show customizable by anyone involved, whether it be guest artist, musician or contributing fan. We love the idea of mixing our character designs with the audience's character designs, making for a very organic show. Since then, Little Brass Bird has become a community show that not only entertains its viewers but also involves and gives them a chance to voice their own ideas!

Anything else you wanted to share?

We have been asked many times why there are such long gaps in between episodes. Our answer is quite simple; there's only two of us. Many people don't realize that this operation is only being conducted by two malnourished art school graduates in their tiny 1 bedroom apartment. So, you can imagine how difficult it can get trying to produce an animated show, and start up a designer toy business only during off-hours from your day job. Although our lack of sleep and over exhaustion has contributed greatly to the madness of our writing, we're slowly working on taking this project on full time and dedicating all of our energies to Little Brass Bird.

Karl Cronin researches the movements and rituals of plants and animals and creates public-art dance pieces to document them. How does a man imitate a field of wheat, a forest of trees, or a common grasshopper? You'll see some moving examples at the festival, but first, some insights from Cronin.



KICKSTARTER: Have you found certain plants or animals to be more or less challenging than others to portray?

CRONIN: Yes. I have generally found plants to be easier than animals. The earliest entries in the Somatic Natural History Archive were of species I found that would stay still long enough for me to work with them. With animals I usually have to observe their behavior and replicate from memory, whereas with plants I can move in sync with them. Motile creatures like to move (which as a dancer I can definitely appreciate).

The challenges that come up in the archiving process are central to this project. How can I begin to understand the physical experience of a grasshopper, Aspen clonal colony, or common house spider? The attempt at understanding the living circumstances of other species is the goal. When I find it difficult to relate physically to another species, it tells me a lot about what it means to be human.



KICKSTARTER: Do you spend a lot of time coming up with and practicing the movements for each species? What's the process like?

CRONIN: I spend a lot of time watching and listening with each organism, doing my best to work past my own limited understandings of what its experience might be. For instance, when I worked with a prairie dog colony last fall in Santa Fe I immediately gravitated to their alert posture and chirping calls. The more time I spent with them I realized that what I was observing was behavior caused by my being there. In time, as I remained there quietly, I began to witness other behaviors.

I take all my experiences from my field expeditions back to the studio where I create a movement portrait that conveys some key aspect of each species. This movement architecture is important to me, as it is the compositional architecture within which I can infuse my thoughts, reflections, feelings from the encounter. There is set choreography for each archive entry, but also a responsive, improvisitory component that allows me to express what it felt like to be there and connect that with an audience.

KICKSTARTER: Anything else you'd like to share?

CRONIN: As a movement artist, this work has already taught me a great deal. I see each species I work with as a teacher; their biological expression and behaviors become my tutorials. This work reminds me that there is so much to explore and discover beyond the boundaries of what we already know. Whenever I stop and really listen/see/feel, I discover things I never could have imagined. I look forward to sharing this process and work with others!

Gregory Bayne's Jens Pulver: Driven is an intimate portrait of Jens Pulver, an aging UFC fighter preparing for the final bout of his career. Bayne spent three months following Pulver as he trained for the fight, and he updated his Kickstarter backers along the way with some of the most captivating project updates we've seen. As backers we got a first-hand look into the demanding process — we felt the highs and lows as they happened.

The Kickstarter project was a tremendous success. Bayne sought an aggressive $25,000 in just 20 days, and came down to the final weekend only halfway there. But the UFC world came alive, and Bayne racked up more than $15,000 in the final few days, all of them pledges for less than $100. It was a remarkable achievement.

We invited Greg to walk us through the story and his film. It's a great look at the documentary process.

KICKSTARTER: Your documentary tells the story of fighter Jens Pulver. How close did you get with Jens? How involved were you in this story?

Over the course of those three months I became quite close with Jens. I really like him as an individual, and in many ways grew to feel akin to him, in terms of the crossroads he currently finds himself in, and the circumstances which have brought him to it. That said, Jens had many more difficulties than I to overcome growing up, but we do share in the scars of poverty, the strength of steadfast mother's and that relentless drive that for better or worse, sees us through.

This friendship however did develop off screen, and other than my lens I don't play a role in the story of the film.

KICKSTARTER: During the final week leading up to Jens' bout, you were posting project updates from the gym and training room on Jens' progress. What was that experience like? And what was it like in the locker room after the match?

The experience in Columbus with Jens and his team was incredible. In many ways the footage from those four days drives the film. I personally had never witnessed anything like what Jens, and all the fighters there, had to endure in those final days before their fight(s). It's intense, dramatic, and full of emotion as they work to make their weight, keep their strength, and maintain their mental state.

I always knew that the film would end just prior to the actual fight, and not predicated on the outcome of it. So, after the fight I put down the camera, exchanged a few messages with Jens, and his crew, and let them have their moment.

I will say that being in the arena that night was one of the most incredible, and touching moments I have ever witnessed. Even in defeat, Jens walked out to a standing ovation from tearful fans, chanting "Pulver, Pulver!"

Vance Reeser's Lake Beast is an animated short about a man haunted by a vision he saw as a young boy. In his Kickstarter project, Vance took backers into the creative process, showing sketches and early storyboards with rudimentary sound effects. It left us transfixed.

We asked Vance about his process and how he came to animation in the first place. Don't miss his concluding thought — pure poetry!



KICKSTARTER: Working on a creative project often requires solitude/isolation, as you seem to suggest in your Kickstarter bio ("long stretches of awkward silence"). But you did a lot of great updates. Did making a Kickstarter project affect the "feel" of the creative process in any way for you? Did it make it more social?

REESER: Oh definitely, yeah. Usually, like you're saying, I work completely alone and maybe show a friend or two and my wife what I'm working on a few times throughout the course of a project... I've also used my site (http://vancereeser.com) in the past to share works in progress, but the traffic was so low I was basically sharing it with those same people anyway, heh. So it was great to actually connect with new people through Kickstarter and it felt good to see them get excited for my work. It sometimes can feel like nobody really cares about the kind of animation I'm into, so it was very encouraging.

It's interesting... At least in my experience, when talking about animation and sharing my work online in different capacities, the type of input or questions I get from people usually have to do with software. Like, “What did you use to get that look?” etc. Thats fine, but it's so boring to me. During the Kickstarter updates, I tried to talk more about what's inspiring me to make the film and share personal stories and things to keep it away from tech talk — and the Kickstarter audience really responded to that, which was encouraging!

KICKSTARTER: When did you start doing animations and how has your style evolved over time...and where do you think it's heading?

REESER: My very first animation was for a friend's band in college. He was doing an enhanced CD (remember those?!) and thought it would be cool to open it with some kind of video. I did a painting that he wanted for the cover art and the animation I did was kind of based on that painting. I drew it on tracing paper with very little planning and worked straight-ahead (animation lingo alert!) and it miraculously didn't turn out terrible!

I did my first Flash cartoon my senior year of college with my friend Noah in 2001. It was about an old man called the Hermit whose hibernation is interrupted by springtime animals and plants so he goes on a rampage. Pretty heavy stuff, right? After that I tried to make this animated kids epic but it took so long I ended up making other films instead, the first of which was called the Bear Hunt. I think that was when I first started to find my voice as a filmmaker... There's so much animation “out there” these days now that the tools are so easy to pick up and it's so easy to share with people. At the same time, so much of it is either some kind of awkward male power fantasy or so introspective and emo it's painful — or it's drawn/rendered really badly. So I started to explore how I could make stuff that's meaningful and/or fun that hopefully engages people and leaves them inspired somehow without falling into the traps and clichés of the medium.

Over time my animation is becoming more hand drawn instead of making the software move things mechanically for me. I also really like lower framerates that make things move slightly jerky instead of what people are used to seeing in theaters with CG and stuff. I saw UP in theaters and thought it was pretty good, but then I walked by a super high-res TV the other day and it was playing UP and of course everything moves perfectly in that movie — but something about it really felt cold and I just wasn't feeling anything for those characters this time around...and that crazy high resolution was what was intended as the ideal watching experience by the filmmakers, I imagine! It looked “better” than what I saw in the theater but it left me cold. I haven't quite put my finger on it yet... When I see like Harryhausen stop-motion or especially a Miyazaki movie, the animation is rougher than the modern Hollywood CG stuff, but it just *hums* with life and energy! I guess thats what I'm trying to tap into more and more — a hand-crafted feel and personal story-telling in an age of silky-smooth production.