The Tain

A few years ago, The Decemberists, one of my personal favorites, relesed an EP called The Tain.
It was a sinlge 18 miunte track divided into 5 cantos based on the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. As for the song, it's amazing and just about as epic as a song can get, and now after years of painstaking hand animation, it has a video.

The task was taken by Montana filmmaker Andy Smetanka, who specializes in construction paper stop motion animation. When I first saw this video, I was convinced that it had to have been done with After Effects, Motion, Toon Boom or one of the myriad other pieces of niche software that specialize in creating cool & off-kilter animation. Yeah, there were a few "hairs" on the film, and some of the exposures looked a bit uneven, but 18+ minutes of hand animation without a digital workflow? Please...

Not so apparently. Mr. Smetanka works entirely with Super-8, the medium that I was introduced to my first semester in film school, but long since lost interest in once that cameras and film got bigger and better in the semesters to follow. Now whats really amazing about this is the animation timing. This guy has to be equal parts meticulous and mathematical--in order to accomplish a single minute of this would take months of trial and error, even for someone trained in modern animation techniques--animation like this simply isn't done like this anymore. The level of frame complexity, synchronization with the soundtrack, speed of cutting and the sheer amount of all of it blow my mind.

Just a note on how all of this was physically constructed: construction paper cut-outs, complete with pinned together joints are laid down over a light box which is covered in a mixture of layers of opaque tissue paper & solid construction paper to form fixed backgrounds. Then, one frame at a time the characters are animated to perform desired action. Since this way shot on Super-8, it was potentially a little bit easier because most Super-8 cameras shoot at 18 frames per second--six frames less than the motion picture standard of 24fps. I'm not 100% sure about whether or not Mr. Smentanka uses a camera that shoot on 18fps or 24fps, but either way, directing animation on film that you have to develop is if anything, painstaiking. So here's the embedded video, and a link for the hi-res version. Enjoy!



Hi-Res available here