Writers and Directors: Jean-Baptiste Maillet and Romain Bermond
These days, mainstream animation relies heavily on computer graphics, even when those graphics attempt to emulate more traditional painted styles. But there’s something distinctive and special about simpler animations that use paper cutouts and other low-fi techniques, often resulting in works where the love and care in their construction shine through.
Antechamber is a celebration of that style of work – except rather than constructed through meticulous frame-by-frame animation, the visual treats created by French duo Jean-Baptiste Maillet and Romain Bermond (collectively known as Stereoptik) are created live.
On two desks on either side of the stage, Maillet and Bermond draw and paint landscapes, close-up cameras projecting their works onto the big screen between them. This is a 3D experience – a paper filled with charcoal scribblings rises to become a sea and sky, undulating as the work is manipulated.
Cardboard cutouts give a 3D impression of Paris’ distinctive apartment blocks or concrete high rises. A simple kitchen sieve, illuminated by handheld lights, transforms into a disco arena. The ability to see the small, delicate work being created in front of our eyes, then projected in mesmeric quality at a large scale, is quite beautiful.
There is some pre-recorded animation involved in these sequences – flocks of birds, silhouettes of a couple walking slowly together – but these are interacted with as elements of the “live” work. We see these animations projected onto surfaces that are further manipulated; the couple’s walk is through a landscape created before our eyes, for example.
The speed, simplicity and beauty with which such pictures are created before us is quite something. Those of a certain age may be reminded of Tony Hart’s work in children’s television and his ability to turn a blank piece of paper into an African savannah or a polar tundra with a few strokes of pastel crayons. As Stereoptik’s work progresses to an Amazonian rainforest and back to a small Parisian garret, we are invited to share not only in the joy of art but in the beauty of its creation.
The evening ends with a fully prerecorded animation using some of the techniques and scenes previously constructed live. There is a narrative present here that is only previously hinted at; an academic writer in his small flat who shares a mutual attraction to the woman in the high-rise across the street. The film allows for greater precision and more moving parts, of course: some of its party scenes, or splashes of colour transforming dark silhouettes into bright figurines, would be beyond even Stereoptik’s accomplished capabilities to be performed live.
But those same live moments linger in the mind after the animation has completed. For an hour, we are not just watching animation being created live; we are being flown into the art. Antechamber is like nothing else one may see on stage. Just a month into 2024, it is hard to imagine anything else this year could even come close.
Continues until 3 February 2024
