Drawn

Jeu is one of my favourite animated shorts of the last few years. Paint-on-glass animation is a technique for animated films by manipulating slow-drying oil paints on sheets of glass.

This film is a series of nine animated cycles composed of 400 paintings that “destroy and reconstruct” themselves like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. The director’s son, Louis Schwizgebel-Wang, performs the accompanying piano piece (Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto).

After the jump, you can watch an interview with Georges Schwizgebel where he talks about the techniques employed in his films.

“In Jeu I used a cycle of 6.5 seconds; then i thought, once we’ve completed a complete cycle, why not use that cycle to provide the detail in another cycle. The drawings are divided by nine. And when you see the whole thing it forms the ninth part of another drawing, and so on…”

(Disclosure: This is an NFB film and I work at the NFB).

via NFB’s 2009 Get Animated program where you can check out animation workshops with top animators in cities across Canada this fall.