AOL Artists

What’s your process? 

I always start from a video I like, something I’ve filmed or found on youtube or saw in a movie, which I then rotoscope. I get them printed out at a copyshop nearby and then I just draw on the back of the papers, I always get like 300 or 400 frames (at least) printed when I go because it’s cheaper. Then I just draw for a couple of weeks until they’re all done, scan them and turn my favorite parts into GIFs. I select favorite parts inside the images that interest me, or I connect parts or just draw things on the pages that don’t have anything to do with the printed side. I’ll have lines stopping where something in the image starts or something like that, the resulting effect kind of abstracts the images I started from but not so much that it becomes unreadable. 

What are your influences? 

When I made my first animation in this style I was inspired by this fan made video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUPJofuMNtE ) for an emeralds song. The way these slow motion images are constantly looped along with music had this hypnotizing effect on me. I kind of wanted to recreate this effect by focusing on movement and only showing certain parts of images that I find beautiful. Other than that, my main inspiration is music actually, my GIF’s are all about rhythm. Music from Oneohtrix point never, Steve Hauschildt, Laurel Halo and Vektroid are definitely what influences me most these days.

I like that it just keeps looping forever, you can sometimes get hypnotized by a good GIF. Like you start looking at one until you realize you’ve been watching the same loop over and over for 10 minutes. I don’t usually look at images for that long anymore, not in this age of the internet, except when I find a good GIF. I also like the loss of quality, you have to bitmap some of your images a bit and then you get these cool dot patterns, I haven’t done much with this effect but I’m experimenting with it.