Recently Stephen Wichuk, Emily Carr’s awesome animation tech, gave me a DVD of animation by Vancouver’s own Stu Hughes and Ben Jacques who used to do animation under the name of Crystal Beard. I had seen some of their work when attending Animatron at Little Mountain studios a few years back, but this was the first time that I got a chance to really binge on their work.
Synesthetics II
The Pink Drugs DVD was about as weird and abstract as I had expected. I really like how they both blend brightly coloured abstract geometric shapes with more hand drawn elements. Synesthetics II hurt my brain a little. But in a good way. I think. The repetitive vortex of colour completely jarred my optic nerves and haunting music made me cling to my bed in a way that I hadn’t since the stargate sequence in 2001.
Aside from their short films, the DVD has a really fun set of music videos. For the sake of brevity I’ll just mention Stairs by Shearing Pinx,Clak Clak by Vincent Parker and Waiting for MIDI Interface by PDF Format. I was really happy to see Waiting for MIDI Interface appear since I’ve recently started to listen to PDF Format through CBC Radio 3. The video really captures the 8-bit mayhem of the song and 10 year-old me is really wishing I could listen to this while playing Cobra Triangle for hours.
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