I LOVE INTERVIEWS1. Other people’s words are reliably much more interesting than whatever I come up with. In 2016 I interviewed legendary hiphop radio deejays Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito Garcia. They told me they liked the piece, so I asked if they knew any more outlets where I could write for money. They introduced me to some editors at Mass Appeal, who greenlit an interview with the legendary claymation animator David Daniels, timed to a one-man retrospective happening that September at Anthology Film Archives. Daniels pioneered the art form known as StrataCut, wherein logs of material are built of clay, then sliced down and photographed one frame at a time; entire animations done in-camera. You may not know his name but you’ve seen Daniels’ stuff: he worked under claymation master Will Vinton (creator of the California Raisins) and made interstitials for Sesame Street, designed commercial graphics for commercials and TV, segments on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, the opening credits for Alex Winter’s misbegotten flop classic Freaked and short-lived MTV show The Idiot Box, and much much more. Daniels’ Youtube channel is an online StrataCut museum.
I called Daniels at his studio (Bent Image Labs in Portland, OR) and, like Stretch & Bob, I found him quite easy to talk to; our interview ran a great deal longer than the Mass Appeal geniuses thought necessary, so an abridged version was published, to my dismay. (Before too long it would disappear from their website entirely2. Seven years later - last Tuesday - I went to a short film program at the bar Freddy’s, in Brooklyn, hosted and organized by Brian Ratigan of Non Films. Most of the shorts were by contemporary filmmakers (including my friends Paul Taylor and Jason Lobe), but there was also a presentation of Peter Gabriel’s hybrid stop-motion live-action video for the song “Big Time” and, to my total astonishment, an in-person Q+A with David Daniels. Turns out Daniels is in New York for “StrataGanza”, at Pratt Institute, October 3-6: an unprecedented weeklong workshop, a historical gathering of the StrataCutters. Our conversation has been reedited slightly for clarity.
How do we even classify your early work? “The clay years”?
Well, it's plasticine. Clay has two or three meanings: it's not pottery clay, it's not ceramics, it's not clay that dries in the sun. It's oil-based plasticine, so it will stay malleable almost forever. It can dry out and become hard if you put it on a backing surface; the impulse, by the way, to do StrataCut came, partially, from clay sculptures getting so dusty and so ragged so quickly, so it's not hard-fired pottery clay, Sculpee or Fimo, or millefiore - that's an Italian slice term. The depth and the limit of clay animation, as done by Will Vinton Studios or by Aardman, the people who have work with it as characters - they all face the difficulty of presenting objects and sculpts without it getting damaged and old. This is what I found out as a young kid sculpting: this is a problem! This doesn't work for me! This is gonna be really difficult! So the ‘cut-clay’ was an attempt to reinvent it as clean. I can store it easily, I can knock these things around, I can take a StrataCut block and kick it? And generally, it will still function when I slice it away – whatever I put into it will come out clean and pristine. So that, to me, was in a sense the reinvention trick that most pleased me in attempting to come up with a way to use this never-hardening medium that was actually unique.
When you go back and look at those StrataCut animations, do they feel less sophisticated than they did at the time? Do you wince?
I think you wince; it's standard-def, there's too much contrast in some places, there's too little fidelity, you're limited. When you look at Buzz Box, there was no optical printing; everything is in-camera. Which, when you understand that, is mindblowing. You look at it now, “Ehh, it could be a little more polished.” There's an enormous slickness to modern film and media-making that are not present in my earlier work. My first theme was to speak to a funhouse mirror of both happiness and horror: how consumer media puts images of complete banality and optimism next to others, of terrible desolation and horror. It combines, every few seconds, back to back, between the commercials and the newscasters, I tried to create the illusion that a brain-dump-download had just happened, where all of the happiness and horror went together. To get through people's filter, I couldn't have just taken TV and edited it; I needed to find a way to break through that filter, and so many people would respond saying, “That was one of the scariest things I've ever seen!” But if you sample any one still image, you would never be able to say “Oh, that's somebody getting shot. Oh, that's somebody dying.” It's an exercise in seduction and abuse, trying to just speak to the aesthetic overload.
I could go through many different moments, but even with Donald Trump it's relevant: the lack of informational continuity, his ability to go – in the middle of a sentence! - from belligerent to a nice guy who “uses the best words”… To (be able to) jump back and forth so quickly, it's because our brains, or at least, the society has been so massaged by images... between entertainment and hard news, that he exists. That was the message of the 80s to me, and as much as there are some technical flaws or shapes around the edges, I feel that's still a very relevant message, still.
The sound, too, is in this kind of perma-flux..
Big shoutout to Drew Neumann. Because he spent six months to actually find a way of describing a soundtrack neither of us had ever done. Samplers had barely even existed at that moment, so we were doing massive overdubs of very very tiny samples; the aesthetic was maximalism, which was just an inside joke against minimalism, which is what our teachers at CalArts were steeped in. They had been born into modernism, adopted minimalism as a rejection of modernism, so Drew and I were trying to reject them with maximalism.
Can you talk a little bit more about this moment? There's a consistency there, I feel – but it seems very punk to me, of a piece with Gary Panter, maybe Lynda Barry, very L.A., your work on Pee-Wee's Playhouse... If it is a CalArts connection, I'm not sure.
I think that's a good thing to point out. You'd call it post-expressionism, right? The reinvention of Edvard Munch, The Scream, works from the 1920s which were leading up to fascism, Hitler and World War II. In a way, yes, punk was a rejection of the glossy and prepackaged – the thing about minimalism is, there's something beautiful about it, at the time I just felt like, okay, everybody's done it. Yes, in a way, you had Mark Pauline and Survival Research Laboratories, Henry Rollins, whose music with Blind Idiot God, was selected for Alex Winter's Freaked, which I did the opening credits for...
I think punk (at its best - when artfully juggling noise, and not just bad music) expresses the post-expressionist, maximal frustration and physical visceral anger as cutting clay and throwing knives back into it to destroy, melt and smear it afterwards... That visual constructive/destructive anger works well with a punk soundtrack. Making huge, complex clay time-woven blocks for weeks, and then cutting them under hot lights in a noisy room with constant hum… It’s very physical, sweaty, exhausting. Performance work with no audience. Much more so than art forms like drawing animation, working at a computer, or painting -- these are contemplative, and generally do not break any kind of sweat.
There's also a Cold War nightmare in the background, through the 1960s and 70s. It comes into its own in the 80s, with the Strategic Defense Initiative; oddly, I think I'm always waffling between those two poles, of seduction and abuse. Musically it's loud/soft, with beautiful melodies and grinding hard things at the same time, even though I know I was before them. With the animated flow cutaways, I'm trying to seduce, and then going to the staccato, strobing, hard things, where everything melts, is destroyed, and comes back again, it sort of fits in the self-irony of “Big Time” - it's all a big put-on. You could allow yourself to go glitzy, and in StrataCut, things are popping all over the place in very fluid and beautiful ways. As well as kind of a nasty, dirty, edge-filled way; clay has a dark-corner-of-the-world funk on its edges you don't wanna get rid of.
I'm juggling fireworks when I do these animations: I'm asking how much information and chaos I can throw at something, as well as how structured and coherent I can make it, so people know I haven't lost them. If I don't ride the chaos and embrace it, it becomes kinda boring. I could use the time to perfect a StrataCut block so well it looked like still animation, but you make these artistic decisions as to where you want the fireworks, how controlled you want them.
To me, punk was too pure, and I couldn't pretend to be that – New Wave was too synthy, so really, Nirvana hit it for me, although I was quite proud to be a part of the Peter Gabriel video. I did a Michael Jackson “ABC” piece which was pure gloss, but I did it in reverse – when you know everything was done in reverse, there's no character animation and there are no optical effects – that's sort of going back in time. The amount we assume and know, from the 1990s on, that everything has been post-touched and post-produced, layered on after the primary image... Part of the time machine is to think, “Wow, how did you put that all into camera without any of those tricks that are so common now?” It worked, oddly, because I was using so much primary color – when you use so much clay, you're using a lot of primary material, throwing in hundreds and hundreds of pounds of this stuff. It's really hard to premix a palate for such quantity of clay. To go to pastels and subtle colors takes a lot of time: you gotta boil it, double-boil it, mix it up, it's a huge set of palette questions. I tended to do what I could with what I call “Oaxacan colors” - bled primaries, black and whites, offsetting yellows, bright yellows and dark blues. And pixellate 'em. Those little animals in Oaxaca get painted up so pretty. Anyway, there's a childishness to that palette which goes to the perversity of the sort of adult, dark worldview. There's consumption on Pee-Wee's Playhouse and ABC and subliminally, there's something else going on there that makes it interesting – not just fluff.
They took me as an artist and said, “We like what you do – can you do something for us?” I couldn't go too far with certain things; you look at The Idiot Box, the MTV show open I did for Alex Winter: I got to make this crazy alien creature blow out of the TV set, and inside his brain is a tin can, the lid pops open, and inside the is a little creature. Those kinds of things are hilarious to me. Like Buzz Box, I'd take you as far as I could without you dropping off. The joke between Drew and I in making it was, “How much can we throw at an audience, and how long will they sit, without walking out? Let's take it to wherever that fine borderline is, force them to be uncomfortable in their seats, but without actually walking out.” (laughs) Our side bet was 1 out of 20, and it wasn't far off in the early screenings.
There's something about inundation – the fact that you'll have the slices depicted in the frame, so you get one car, one rocket, then you get another one, then the entire frame is clogged... These would have been isolated, centered images under minimalism. You're pushing the question of their... viability?
Viability, watchability... It also was, to me, a great way to deal with mass culture. Here I had a medium that could duplicate thousands of things in one slice – hundreds of cars, let's say. I was trying to, in a sense, show that off: I'm not limited to one model of car! That duplicates modern consumerism, right? A million models, or at least a million colors of the same thing... kind of an Andy Warhol joke, where you're saying, Hey, I can silkscreen every version of Marilyn and Elvis for you, but you're really mocking the ability of consumerism to do that. Cars and rockets, you know – the same technology that builds the cars is building the weapons. I try to have a relativist view of war and peace, because many of our greatest inventions were spurred by war. What causes the human race to invent things? It was mixed media - not just the pure morphic time-blocks. The opening title sequence for Freaked! is full of actual eggs, and unwound cassette tapes, and physical things – hair combs, all sorts of things. It helps give the clay a different feeling, combined with other looks and feelings.
If it's just flat-screen, hypno-morphic clay, I think it's only interesting for 30 seconds. It needs something else to keep it going. I am fascinated with bringing a little more character animation to another piece but I don't know if I'll ever get to it – defined characters doing defined character things within StrataCut, while 3D versions of those characters are coming out of the block and going back in. If you could imagine looking at yourself from here to eternity, however long you've been on Earth, as a StrataCut, the moment you step outside to become a reflexive look, you become three dimensional and look back at your two-dimensional surface. You can contemplate: “That's me, moving through that thing!” Before you're sucked back in and have to live your life again. That's a metaphor for eternity and I believe there's character animation that could be interesting, in that.
Because StrataCut is 2-and-3 dimensional at the same time.
I actually don't say it that way enough, but I'm glad you pointed that out.
So maybe this sounds dumb, but... how conscious, or how wary, were you of showing the log? The block? Did you try to hide the dimensionality of the base?
Well, there have been times when I've just done textures or full-frontal cutting. In Buzz Box there are several full frontal pieces that don't go on that long – in the documentary you see me cutting these kind of Incan pyramid shapes on a down-shooter, big, long structures tapered to the lens. They're small at the top and thick at the bottom, but they have a deep ziggurat; those were straight up, right into the lens – that's an example of me thinking “this'll be dypsomorphic enough”. Everything in Buzz Box was edited in rewind – I never had a flatbed or any kind of regular speed equipment. I ended up feeling 36 frames per second was the right speed, but originally I thought 24 frames was the right second. As I began to reedit them I realized, 48 frames by hand is too fast; 24 is too slow, and I started to get a rhythm going that was 36. It was definitely an after-the-fact thought. It would have been 2-1-2-1-2-1, and that was partially because the blocks were too slow. This has to do with how you build: the rules by which a line diagonally moves through the block create the speed, so if that line is really flat, it's a flash. If it's really perpendicular to the lens, the line is barely moving at all. I designed the motions intuitively, thinking oh, this is about the right amount of motion – but I was wrong by 50%. When I really wanted to play them back, I wanted them to be about 50% faster, and it started to pick up a kinetic energy. Again, I wouldn't hold on those longer than 7 or 10 seconds at the most. I put a lot of flashy white clay and other spectacular types of stuff in there to make sure the eyeball was getting plenty of information.
At this point, I would show the edges on everything. The side view of a StrataCut block, makes the mystery of what appears on the surface even greater. I made a very conscious choice to stay Strata-Flat - directly facing the camera. Those were some of the first things I did. Then I started doing the multi-plane stuff, with the blobs of gloss as you're cutting away.. I blurred them. Once I got to the last piece of glass I had this moving background, and I would put a lightbulb right underneath that last slice; there'd be a second piece of glass, right up in the lens, big, so there would never be an optical pop. And I dropped the glass to sandwich the last slice, and slowly heated it with the lens in the back, which slowly created a lighting strobe. And then I could smear the thing. Those came after I got past stages one, two and three in sort of experimenting with stuff. And I never looked back – seeing the cracks and the sides and the edges, all the stuff that makes it strange, is really important to me.
Whether you're shooting on film or with one of these super-duper HD cams, though, you're gonna need to know your framerate ahead of time – right?
...Yes. I would have a more precise understanding of what result I wanted; it's something of a formula, where the thickness of your slice determines how the speed with which you want it to move. Smaller blocks, like 3” by 4”, I can slice thinner. Larger ones, like the Gary and Mike Acid Trip, I needed a guillotine – it was so thick, so difficult, so heavy. You have to go thicker when you get bigger because of the sort of surface tension, the control – it doesn't respond the same way. I had to think through the effect I wanted so I put in the slant of the speed because of that.
I'm thinking high definition is 16K. They're barely thinking about 8K right now, but 16 is not that far off – when you realize what's behind the curve of all these crazy resolutions it sounds like it's a long way away, but it really isn't; I'm talking to the people building this stuff. It's all compression and parallel processing and graphics processing units. I would think ultimately VR, at 64K, will probably be a resolution limit where it really just won't matter anymore. Now, that may be ten years away, I don't know how I will shoot it per se; the depth map is really critical. In “baked” VR, which is narrative film VR, I'm telling you an experience – as opposed to gaming VR, where you're finding that experience, with options. You're going from A to Z and the storyteller is telling you the story. By “baked”, we mean there's no option to divert to a new path or a new place. I'm coming at it as a cinema storyteller so I'll probably bake it, but current VR is taking all its cues from the same node right now: the center-pivot. It's boring because you can only morph to another pivot – you can't actually move your head around it. That's the second revolutionary piece coming to VR. So you'll get to see Meryl Streep eventually, not as a 2D thing – you'll be able to look around the edges of her, so she's actually popping out as fully dimensionalized from all views of your head motion. The high resolution plus the depth will allow veracity, so you'll be truly transported as opposed to crudely. I believe that's a fundamental “oh fuck, what am I watching?” So much more interesting, again.
You've put a ton of your material online – it's not hard to imagine where many artists would take a patenting, or proprietary approach. Can you tell me about your thinking?
It was very mysterious when StrataCut first came out: there were no computers, but so many people would share their enthusiasm for this crazy stuff that didn't make sense – it was at once coherent and overwhelming. The process of figuring out timed sculpting and a motion flow that coexist in space, over time, these kinds of ideas, led to me thinking about how virtual reality and augmented reality will effect StrataCut. I was trying to examine it in MRI scans about seven years ago and through CG StrataCut; they reveal totally different outcomes of the same idea. The reason I love future technology is, not only am I an artist or a creative still searching for something better, but part of why my work stopped in 2000 was, everybody was saying “Oh, that must be CG.” The magic of having put all that effort into creating something astounding for the eyeballs was denigrated by Jurassic Park, by Pixar, et cetera. (Laughs) People thought “Oh, that's just another special effect.” I believe a new epoch is coming, a new moment is upon us, and high-resolution, high-fidelity, depth-mapped images will allow both the analog version, the colored-clay, putty-programming that I used to do, to reveal itself in a super high-resolution medium, and therefore be amazing again.
It gives me some hope that returning to the medium might actually be worth it; it's not that many years until I will have a 16K virtual reality with depth maps that you can pivot your head around. Or I'll have the ability to do an augmented reality, where the context of spatial actuality, combined with the virtual overlay, is an amazing combustion between two visual elements, to create a hallucination or “halluci-dation” if you wanna call it that, a digital hallucination. That's hypno-morphic, and compelling! So all the sudden, I wasn't born too early; I felt that film was a very crude medium when I was young. Now I feel there's actually brain-to-brain transplant mediums beginning to emerge, where we're so separated from our own body awarenesses, or you're so immersed in what's a hallucination, a holograph in reality, whatever – time-sculpting will become relevant again.
More than that, the ability to bend the blade is fascinating to me. A straight blade, because of the nature of knives, is a limit – to create the optical flow, either from an analogue color-cut block or from a generated series of live-action spatial frames, allows you to cut any direction with any kind of.. you could take ice cream scoops, corrugated ripple knives, you can do anything. It transforms the language possibilities one more time. So that's why, perhaps, I have a little perspective. I've been putting up a little stuff, mostly spurred by the Anthology show, and the compression of time in the presentation; I'm used to showing at Anima Mundi or Chilimonos, other festivals that would have me talk for three hours, so I could both show my work, show my slides, explain the process/history... knowing I only have 80 minutes, I've been forced to say, “hey, how do I show the history of StrataCut in 4 and a half minutes?”
Can you talk more about the discrepancy between CG and clay?
I think naturally, CG tends towards cleaner, more synthetic results; I'm impact-neutral. I feel the beauty of taking colored mud and programming it and making the time-sculpt; I also feel the amazing potential of CG. I don't think they end up being the same thing – maybe the same theory or set of ideas works, but you would have to uniquely attack the CG for its own aesthetic results, right? I embrace both. I believe in the larger sense that there's time-blindness in all of us; we have not developed our sixth (or seventh, if you like) sense. As an evolutionary species we've developed what we needed but we've never needed to understand motion over time. So I'm trying to sort of pull back the curtain in my own discoveries and hopefully share a little bit of that in speaking to the integrated co-relationship of all moments in time, together, as a metaphor. When I do another clay or “primary” StrataCut, I will involve as much textual combinations as I can. There's a sort of a graffiti aspect, or a Banksy aspect, to it that I like to explore. It's where you place the cuts and what they're doing – what's directly next to them, behind them, all that real/gritty context, will make some future piece even that much more interesting than the stuff I've done in the past. I'm currently in the middle of an augmented reality startup project (youar.io) that involves a bit of AR/VR with six degrees of freedom, the ability to have depth maps in VR, so a lot of these things are quite close to me, technically, right now – I'm trying to invent things that don't yet exist, at least, are five years on the horizon. I don't know what that makes me! I would hope once the tech is usable, I'd still have the energy left to make a film with it. Right now I'm very addicted to trying to reinvent those mediums, and seeing the work other people are doing with creating ever-higher fidelities and depths of understanding of medium.
I believe the higher resolution rates will allow more human stuff to happen, but I know that sounds like a contradiction. It will be that much harder, again, at 16k or who knows? - 64k, for computers to fake “human”. If “human” is captured in a flash or in an instant, a computer has to work very very hard, very very long, to get that resolution. Very oddly, it opens up a reinvention of handmade stuff, because that will be uniquely marketable and seen for the kind of reverse-marketing: something that isn't what everybody else, or all the other machines, are doing. So that's a new opportunity. Pokemon Go, for instance – it's a surface image thrown on a camera view. Blended, or mixed reality, where actual virtual objects are completely integrated in a plane-space and you cannot tell the difference – you're asking an entirely different question there.
Special thanks to David Daniels, Brian Ratigan and Ava Tews.
Current Mood: Creative 🎨
Current Music: Vito Ricci - Cross Court (Get It)
See an incomplete Google Doc consolidating all my interviews. I really need a website. This substack is progress…….