As a stop motion indie animator, Scott Kravitz is one among only a few these days. Despite the fact that computer generated animation now blankets the market, Kravitz labors, painstakingly at times, in small spaces, with his Bolex, crafting one frame at a time. "I know how to animate on a computer, but I’m not very good at modeling, rigging and lighting in the computer, doing all the things that need to be done in order to make a decent character," he admits. "But, I can sculpt and light in the real world, so stop motion as a medium is very accessible for me..."

From the early live action Family Portrait to his most recent claymation Loom, Kravitz uses the medium to explore big ideas like familial dysfunction, absurdity and death. There's a dark, underground element to the films, and yet the pieces are not shocking or overtly challenging. Rather, the films are complex statements declared simply and with a surrounding sense of comfort. Here Kravitz talks about these artistic statements and the challenges of producing stop motion.

SM: When you went into Family Portrait,…in terms of the artistic approach, where were you coming from, and what commentary were you trying to make?

SK: That film was originally made to be part of an art installation that I was working on called ‘Loop.’ In that installation, I had about seven rear projection screens that were stretched inside old picture frames. Behind each one was a 16mm projector that was projecting the film loop that I shot, a different one on each piece. And so, when you would walk through the room, it was like walking through a gallery of moving paintings. Some of the rear projection screens had oil paintings that I had done on the front surface and then the film image coming through the back. So, Family Portrait was originally just made to be one of those pieces, and I was only intending on using the first six seconds. When the boy falls out and gets pushed back in, that was a loop.

About a week before I was going to shoot, I thought, “Well, since I’m going to have my whole family set up there to shoot this little piece, why not just use the whole roll?” So, Family Portrait is exactly 100 feet of 16mm film. My Bolex camera holds 100 ft. daylight spool. When the film ends, that’s the actual roll out.

Once I started playing with this idea of having a portrait where the people are static but there’s still some movement to them, I started thinking of different ways that a family could age or change without the family members instigating the actions on their own or doing any kind of acting. It was really just things happening to them.

I tried to make it as humorous as I could, but it ended up being dark. I really didn’t expect that was going to happen, but when I saw the film for the first time, I was so upset that it was so depressing that I didn’t show it to anybody for two years. I just put it in my closet…So although the film was made in ’93, it didn’t get shown anywhere until ’95.

SM: I definitely picked up that there was a sly humor to it. When you think about it, you have your family, and in so many ways, your life, your parents and siblings, there are so many differences between these connected people. There are the separations, and there is the growth.

SK: Yeah, yeah. There are elements of the film that a lot of people can relate to. In fact, when I showed the installation, several of the pieces including Family Portrait, [went to other exhibitions] including a reception at a gay and lesbian film festival, and many people interpreted it as a gay piece. I got a call from a reporter asking me to comment on the work as a gay artist, and I’m not gay, but there was that perception. It’s all how you read it. Any work about alienation resonates with a lot of people, especially when it’s a family dysfunction or alienation.

SM: One technical thing that I noticed about both Magic Trick and Loom is the incredible fluidity of the stop-motion…How does that work for your aesthetic? How does that come about?

SK: Every animator, especially stop motion animators—there are very few stop motion animators around but—a lot of us can recognize each other’s work because we all develop our own styles of animation. The fluidity that I try to put into my animation, it’s something that I enjoy, and yet at the same time I think that fluidity can come out of a timidity to do something more bold. I really enjoy broader animation, and yet it’s very difficult for me to do sometimes because I have this attachment to the very smooth, fluid animation.

This is the thing in animation, specifically with short film, the reason a person would make a short film is either that they’ve got a vision that they simply have to do, or they do it as a calling card, something to get a better job. I hope that each of my films can accomplish both of those tasks. As an animator I certainly am striving to give myself a better name as a director, show myself capable of certain types of animation or more professional looking animation. Sometimes you can accomplish this professionally on your job, but sometimes it takes a short film of your own work to use as a calling card. Then on the other side is the desire to create a story on your own and to see it finished.

SM: By fulfilling those dual roles, like you said, the thing that needs to remain intact, at least for me coming from the viewer’s perspective, is that the intention needs to remain true. That’s not to say it can’t be a commercial intention, that it can’t be a calling card. But, it has to come from a real place. Looking at that, where do you find yourself drawing ideas from?

SK: Films like Family Portrait and Magic Trick, those are really based on a single idea, an epiphany. Magic Trick was just really about coming up with the ending, how this trick would work. Family Portrait was the single idea of a different way of approaching or looking at a picture. For a while I was really in love with that idea of the single shot, locked down camera as an entire film, and I made a couple more films in that same vein.

Loom was more a gradual, and it came out of a combination of different ideas. That’s where I’m usually able to get stories, putting together two ideas, and I think that’s the way a lot of people work. At least for me it seems the best way, taking two ideas that have nothing in common and finding a way to make them work together. Out of that you can get a much deeper story and then embellish it from there.

With Loom, I had the idea of portraying Death as an old woman in a wheelchair, and I had never seen Death portrayed as an old woman, let alone an old woman in a wheelchair. That idea interested me because it seemed like I could get some surprise out of that. If I set up the idea for the audience that she was going to die, and it turns out she’s Death, I thought that could be interesting. I had always liked Emily Dickson, and that poem in particular that begins the film, “Because I could not stop for death/ He kindly stopped for me…” The second idea that added to Loom was the Greek mythology of the three fates who would spin the thread and cut the thread, and the length of the thread determined the length of one’s life. Once I combined that idea into Death itself, somehow the loom came out of that.

I had this idea that the soul could be materialized in the form of a thread that would be added to this fabric. That is what Loom is about. At the end of the film you see that she’s weaving this giant fabric that goes on and on, and that fabric is supposed to be heaven or any afterlife in which everybody’s soul is enmeshed. Along the fabric you can see there are these Hebrew letters. It’s an acronym that they put on tombstones in Israel. There’s no proper English translation from the phrase, but it means approximately, “May this person’s soul be enmeshed with God.” I like that idea because of the enmeshing of the threads in the fabric. It all seemed to fit. These were all ideas that came afterwards, after the original inspiration, but I liked them because once I had that original foundation, I could add to it and deepen it in the story.

Whether or not those things were made obvious in the film, I didn’t think it was as important as just to have a film that had a rich story, and if those certain aspects were important, people would pick up on them. It seemed wrong to call attention to them.

SM: Like you said, it was very interesting to have the old women represent the amalgamation of the three fates, particularly because in mythology the fates were feared even by the gods. To bring up this idea of timidity again, it’s was interesting to have this enfeebled, timid protagonist come to the forefront as the bearer of the burden into the afterlife. Interestingly too, it felt very functional for her to weave. I didn’t get a sense that there was any joy in this process for her. Particularly when you see her on the bus, for just a split second, you see her cringe. I thought that was nice, that she’s an unwilling bearer of this passage…

SK: That street scene was the hardest to shoot because I wanted to make it very clear that one, like you say, she wasn’t getting any joy out of it. I wanted to make sure people didn’t see her as a malicious source. But, I wanted to make it as evident as possible that she didn’t cause the accident, that she was there because it was going to happen. So, you don’t see her show up until the sequence of events has already started in terms of the girl stepping forward to throw the coin.

Something else I tried to convey though I don’t really think it came across,—and like I was saying, if it’s not important than I don’t want to call attention to it— I liked the idea that nobody could see the old lady except for the person who was about to die. That’s why the cellist notices her across the street just as the girl is about the throw the coin. By then the sequence has started, and so he’s distracted back to the girl and her running into the street.

That one shot that you were talking about where the old woman cringes from the impact, I had a lot of difficulty about whether or not to include that shot. I didn’t want to make her emotional, but I wanted to make sure people got the idea that she was not happy about it or wanting it to happen. This was just her job.

Just like Family Portrait I thought that I was making a different film than I was making. When I finish it, it always turns out different than what I thought…My friend made an interesting comment because he was aware of the film through the whole process. I asked him, “Did the film turn out the way you thought it was going to?” And, he said that when I was making the film, he thought I was making a Christian view of death…I thought originally that Death was going to give peace to this cellist and relieve him of his pain, but it turned out that she was just more a neutral party, taking the soul and moving along.

SM: Though my knowledge of religion is sadly scant in comparison to that of mythology, the Christian view of death could also entail punishment. For this particular cellist, however, there’s a lyricism to his song, and though I don’t want to say the song represents this life—

SK: (laughing) It does actually.

SM: So I am going to make that assumption then. It’s a very bittersweet song. You don’t get the impression that the cellist is particularly fickle, that his ideas are in any way aggressive…There’s almost a lullaby quality to it, almost as if he’s playing himself into some other kind of reality, some kind of long sleep. How did you go about working [with Melora Creager of Rasputina] to create that song?

SK: Melora Creager’s band Rasputina I’ve been a big fan of for a long time. I’d been trying to get ahold of them for a while without any success. My letters never made it to her, until one time they performed on tour in San Francisco. I brought a package with a videotape of some of my other work and a letter, and I asked somebody to take it backstage. About three months later I got a call from her saying that she’d be willing to do the music.

The music had to be written and performed before the animation. If you know animation, if you know the way it’s done, any kind of dialogue has to be recorded ahead of time because you have to animate to the dialogue. Likewise, the music, because I had the cellist performing to the music, I had to know exactly on what frame particular notes where occurring. So, I had to get her to do the music very early on in the process.

All I could give her were drawings, a description of the story, and I wrote a backstory for the character of the cellist—where he came from and why he was where he was. It was just a fanciful, made up story of a boy raised in a mining town in Romania. That’s another thing—I had gone to Romania a few years before making the film, and I took pictures of some of the towns’—towns called Cibiu and Cluj—particular color and condition of the buildings. All the buildings in the street scene are based on pictures. I made the buildings directly modeled after the buildings in those pictures. So, I decided to set the whole film in Romania, and that helped dictate the style of the music, something with a more gypsy quality. So, this character, his backstory, was that he came from a mining town, and everything changed with the political upheaval and uprising in 1989. So, he could never go back to his town, and the music that he played echoed the sound that he used to hear all through his childhood of the mine shaft and the machinery, that cyclical sound that always provided a background noise to his childhood. Whether or not Melora used that, I think she took what she needed and came up with a really beautiful score.

SM: You’ve taken up the cello yourself now. How is that going?

SK: Loom took me four years to make, and I really started hating the film about two years into it. The only way that I was able to finish that film was because I told myself that it’s better to have a really bad finished film than a really great unfinished film. I didn’t want to have Loom hanging over my head forever so I just forced myself to do it, and I’m glad I did. I did much better than I could have thought, especially considering my opinion of it towards the end.

I got so tired of constantly animating,—the reason I got so tired of it was because I was working on weekends and holidays while I continued working full-time as an animator— and I got so overwhelmed that I said, “When I get done with us, I’m going to do something else for a little bit.” And so, the week I finished the film I started taking cello lessons. I’ve always loved the instrument, and it seemed like no better time than now to start learning.

SM: That seems like a very thematically cyclical way to hate a film.

SM: I didn’t do the breakdown. I know that Loom is over five minutes long, but even with a piece like Magic Trick, which is only around two minutes and 19 seconds, that’s more than 3000 frames. How is it that you on a Saturday, when you wake up, say, “This is how many frames I have to get shot today?” How do you motivate yourself?

SK: It’s extremely difficult. On Loom the only way to do it was to break it up into small chunks and say, “I’m going to try to finish this scene by the end of the summer. That’s just what I have to do.” The other thing with stop motion is that once you start a shot, it’s a bad thing to stop it halfway through. If I have a shot that’s 200 frames long, I can perhaps do that over two days, but every time that I stop for the day and turn off the lights, I risk the camera moving, the light levels shifting. I risk all sorts of environmental accidents that could destroy the shot completely, and I wouldn’t know it until I got the film back and found that all the work was for naught. So, once you start a shot in stop motion, it’s imperative that you get it done in as few sessions as possible.

SM: Has that risk actually come about before with your work?

SK: I’ve had that happen, especially professionally, where a camera got bumped, and I didn’t know it. Or, what’s happened several times is that the camera failed to advance the film correctly, and it all got jammed. So, when you go to download the camera, suddenly the film just springs out, and it’s destroyed. Camera malfunctions are not infrequent, and it’s a hazard of the work.

A lot of people now are shooting digitally, and so while they don’t have that problem, they have lots of other problems. With film you do run the risk of losing a shot for a simple reason of something you might just have overlooked. That being said, Magic Trick was a really risky endeavor because the entire film is all one shot. Once I started shooting, I had to get it done as quickly as possible. When the average would be five seconds a day, I would shot from five to eight a day.

I had finished one job, and I took some time off between jobs to do Magic Trick. So, I believe Magic Trick took me six weeks, that was working ten-hour days in my closet, just shooting every day. Even after the first day of working on it, I started having dreams in which no matter what is happening in the dream, I would turn around, and there would be my camera and somebody was moving it. I was sweating the whole time because if I got the film back, and it had been bumped and there was a camera jam, that wouldn’t have been just a couple days of work lost. It would have been six weeks lost. As an exercise, Magic Trick was a risky and probably unwise endeavor, but I was really lucky that it came out okay. It’s not something I would do again.

For more information visit www.scottkravitz.com.

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