For their first joint project, Joyrider Films’ Wade Shotter and Andras Ketzer created “Swing,” a faux stop-motion spot for Sun-Rype. Independently, Wade and Andras’ work is full of inventive, idiosyncratic imagemaking. Together, they have a chemistry that will hopefully bear even more fruit (sorry, I could resist) in the future.
Building on the aesthetics of Wade’s Fujiya Miyaki “Ankle Injury” music video, “Swing” creates the look of stop-motion using a CG approach. A little inside info from Joyrider Films, where all the CG was created:
It was meant to feel more like stop frame but because of the very complicated nature of the various images, we went down a CG route. A lot of the live action is rotoscoped images that we shot, then blocked out and then all the particle animation work was built and animated.
To convince the client that they could indeed pull of this feat of technical wizardry, Joyrider created a couple test films.
The effect is mesmerizing. I think the fact that it’s not “real” stop-motion makes it even more entertaining. It’s a simulacrum of a simulacrum, a hall of mirrors in which the original referrant is identifiable but not easily located. Yes, there’s a girl on a swing, but she’s put through a visual blender: rotoscoped, then interpreted as particles in the form of fruit (which in themselves are merely a CG reference to real fruit), all of which is then finessed to look like stop motion.