Director Lynn Tomlinson speaks with Dragonframe:
DF: What is this project about?
LT: This is the story of the last house on a sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay, told through a folksong sung from the house’s point of view.
DF: What materials are you using and equipment?
LT: My medium is clay-on-glass, which I also call clay-painting animation. I spread a thin layer of oil-based modeling clay on a sheet of glass, and use bits of different colors to add details. In my earlier work like my spots for Sesame Street and PBS Kids, the clay was lit from below, which was brighter and more like watercolors. For this film, I lit the clay from above, which created a muted look like a moving oil painting.
My process involves both planning and improvisation. I spend about three hours to make one second of finished animation. I concentrate on altering the malleable clay, moving it almost like finger paint, changing it slowly, frame by frame. When I allow the clay to smear and smudge, it makes the movement more fluid and expressive.
I am using a Canon DSLR with a light-weight light table built from IKEA parts and plywood, and a copy stand arm and simple clip on lights. I needed to be able to put it all in my car and take it with me on the artist residency where I made the first two minutes of the film.
I used to own an Oxberry Master Series animation stand, which I sometimes miss. But it is great to be mobile and flexible. And I love using Dragonframe. It is such a fantastic tool – simple yet deep. It has allowed me to work in ways I always hoped to – combining rotoscoping with my under-the-camera methods. I used line-up layers to import video clips and images as a guide for my story.
DF: How did you go from the concept to your short film?
LT: One day online I came across the haunting image of this house standing alone in the water in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. I had been looking for an idea for a film for my MFA thesis at Towson University, where I’m now a professor. I learned that this house had been the last house remaining of a once-thriving fishing village on Holland Island, and it finally went down in a storm in 2010. Reading more about the house, I was struck by its story, and its relevance today, when so many communities are facing challenges from sea-level rise. I was heading to a two-week artist residency at Saint Mary’s College on the southern tip of Maryland, surrounded by the waters of the Chesapeake, and I knew I wanted to make a project influenced by that setting. So I thought this house might be just the right subject for the film I hoped to animate.
I started with a thumbnail storyboard and a conversation with my writer son about the story circle to structure the narrative of the house. I had decided that a folk song would be a poetic way to give the house a voice without overly anthropomorphizing it. So from my residency, I Skyped with Anna Roberts-Gevalt, a musician friend, and she suggested I write a ballad. So I did – I wrote the lyrics that summed up the house’s story, and the underlying themes about the nature of time and impermanence. I sent the lyrics to her, and she sang a scratch track and emailed it to me, so from the second day of my residency, I had a sound track to work from.
To plan the film, instead of a storyboard I edited a video mash-up animatic from found footage and video I shot, as well as paintings for reference. Sometimes I used this video-collage as a rough guide, and other times I used actually rotoscoped the movement, to add a life-like quality to my moving paintings.
Sometimes I let the clay lead me to the next frame and through a full transition: for example, the house disappearing in the bubbles under the sea was an improvised moment. I let go and used my imagination, and trusted that the house could reappear at the bottom of the sea.
DF: What is your general art background and who or what do you credit as your main inspirations?
LT: I have always made art, and took an animation elective in 8th grade, where I made clay pigs dance under the camera. In college I took a visual anthropology course taught by Robert Ascher where we used drawing directly on film to portray a myth from another culture. I later studied with experimental animator Sky David (formerly known as Dennis Pies) in graduate school, and his experimental and kinesthetic approach to teaching animation had a huge impact. I have taught art and animation for many years, and there are many animators who inspire me. Of course, Caroline Leaf’s sand and paint on glass films have always been an inspiration. The Ballad of Holland Island House was also inspired in many ways by Frédéric Back’s film Crac!, both in the narrative ideas and in my use of folk music to set the tone.
The images I chose and the visual style reflects the artwork of Winslow Homer, Vincent Van Gogh, and Kathe Kolwitz, artists working in the late 1800s, the time period when the house on Holland Island was abandoned. I also looked at paintings by Andrew Wyeth, because even though his work is much later, he has a real knack of giving houses soul in his paintings. His compositions often include views out windows that capture a feeling of abandonment I wanted in my story.
DF: You seem to have an interesting approach to your physical medium and place in the scene, both technologically and in impact. What are your close goals for your art and where would you love to see your field expand?
LT: I am in the brainstorming phase for my next clay-painted film. Technically, I plan to continue using the line-up layers to use video reference. I like doing research, and finding images to use and transform is part of the fun. Just to experiment, I might make a short project that is more abstract.
I am drawn to stop-motion of all kinds, because I love feeling the human presence and trace of the hand, and it’s exciting how technology is leading to a combination of high- and low-tech that is really appealing. Dragonframe is great because it feels like a natural extension of tools that animators have developed over the past hundred years.
DF: Thank you so much for your time and for making such a moving picture.
The Ballad of Holland Island House Facebook Page
A peek behind the scenes of ‘The Ballad of Holland Island House’:
blog by Vera Long