Miszczyk | In the Dark

Director’s Notes

YOUTUBE LINK: https://youtu.be/v9B1xHfPPY4 For “In the Dark” I was inspired by 60s design icons Mary Blair and Ray Eames. Both Blair and Eames had wonderful studios full of toys, textiles and furniture, that they felt inspired joy in the viewer. I think it’s every artist’s dream to work out of a studio as amazing as Blair or Eames, and to create work that makes the world slightly more beautiful.

The animation’s narrative focuses on a designer maically manipulating the “colourful junk” in her office, and using the designs to transform her city.

It was animated using the colourful junk in my own studio, with both stopmotion and digital techniques. :)

Psychic Weapons | All on Fire

Video directed & created by Jesse Yules: "All On Fire" Produced by Glenn Milchem from forthcoming full-length "Press Play To Erase" Engineered/additional production by Tim Vesely at the Woodshed Mastered by Peter Letros at Wreckhouse Mastering Extra thanks to Mr. Pharmacist ^ All of the above: Toronto, Ontario, Canada ^ Psychic Weapons is a band from Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Broken Orchestra - Director Charlie Tyrell

I created a video installation as the centre piece for director Charlie Tyrell’s musical documentary Broken Orchestra. Director: Charlie Trell Official Selection: SXSW, Sundance Film Festival. Synopsis: When the Philadelphia public-school system began losing almost all the funding for its music-education programs in 2007, thousands of instruments in need of repair were forced into retirement, and community members moved to action.

Diana | Perpetual Surrender (2013)

Perpetual Surrender is my second video experimenting with folded paintings. This time I used images with a strong, singular light source, that cast a shadow on one side of the figure (Carmen Elle from DIANA). I tried to illustrate the idea of a personality with different sides, by mirroring and animating the lit side of the portrait, then contrasting that by mirroring the shadow side of the portrait.

I think it’s interesting that a lot of movement and animation can be added to an image with simple folding and plan to do more of it in the future. 

 

Warm Myth | Working (2012)

New video for Toronto's Warm Myth. Creator's Project premiere. A new band featuring Casey Mecija (Ohbijou) and Keiran Adams (Sarah Harmer, Bonjay). Paintings and animation by yours truly. Rebloged at Boooooom, YourMusicToday.

Making of... 

For Warm Myth I wanted to continue playing with some of the peekaboo shots I used in my previous video for Of Montreal’s “Spiteful Intervention.” I like the idea of an alternate video lurking under the video we’re watching. I began thinking of ways that an image could morph or fold out of the way to reveal a new image. I visited some simple origami blogs looking for ideas. After a while I started to think the origami folds could be used not just as transitions, but to animate paintings. The same trick is used to make the head of state on a paper bill appear to be smiling. Don Hertzfedt’s classic “Rejected” also comes to mind, although “Rejected” takes the idea much further. 

As with the Of Montreal video, I did a series of paintings I thought fit the vibe of the song, then experimented with folding the paintings in various ways. From there, I decided to play off the geometry of the folds created, which led me to experiment with kaleidoscope images. I knew that the kaleidoscope effect had been done to death (it’s an After Effects filter) so I thought it might be interesting to try and do the effect practically.  Bellow is a rough set up from the shoot. I shot the folded paintings near a window in my house, to take advantage of the natural light.

Kathryn Calder | Who Are You?

Dance video for the great Kathryn Calder. Exclaim Article on Kathryn. Visit my partner Cameron's site. Credits | Camera: Greg Biskup, Costume Designs: Lee Stringle, Projections: Emma O'Neil, Dancers: Sessy Lee Slater and Peng Cherry.  Special thanks to Dean Tzenos, Brendan Black, Todd Julie and Chris Chapman.

Kathryn Calder Making of...

May - July 2011

In the summer of 2011 Cameron Tomsett, Dean Tzenos and I began throwing around concepts for our friend Kathryn Calder’s new track “Who Are You?”. She had requested a “weird, fun dance video”. We threw around several ideas: Belly dancing video? Break dancing C3P0? A Sesame Street parody… Finally we decided on a stream of animated, colourful shapes with sexy lady legs, similar to the “lets go out to the lobby” cartoons at old movie theatres. 

We came up with rough ideas for the costumes. We knew we wanted the designs to evolve and become more complex as the song progressed.

Eventually we decided it would be interesting to focus on animal evolution. We would start from basic shapes and as we added more geometry to the costumes, we would move up the evolutionary tree — Worm, fish, octopus, crab, gator, dinosaur, bird, pony, monkey and finally a human which would be played by Kathryn Calder herself.

Our friend, painter and designer Lee Stringle helped us design the “evolving” costumes. Each costume in the sequence has one or more extra geometric planes, or polygons, than the design that proceeded it. 

Once we had the designs, we had to think about how to best build the costumes. We crafted a 1 meter diameter buckyball out of paper mache as a test, but the prototype was both too heavy and too rough-looking to work for the concept. 

After consulting local builder Melissa Fisher, we decided to build the costumes from large sheets of foamcore. To create the blue prints for the costumes, we built 3D CGI versions of the animal designs in Maya. Using a program calledpepakura we “unwrapped” the CGI models and converted them into 2d blue prints.

We then projected the patterns onto 48 x 72 inch foamcore boards and traced the images with pencil. Afterwords, we used box cutters to trim the designs and duct tape to assemble the pieces into the final costumes.

During our construction marathon, I managed to slice the pad off of my index finger with a box cutter. It was 12:30 at night on a Tuesday, and all the stores were closed. Cameron, along with my roommate Brendan, ran around the neighbourhood looking for bandages while I sat pinching my finger in the fetal position. I figured I could fuse the severed skin back onto my body if I applied enough pressure. I had a rotten sleep that night. For some reason, because I have never had a pain in my finger before, I thought finger pain would be mild and easily ignored. It was not.

16 hrs and a few Tylenol liquid jells later, we were back at full capacity. Incidentally, a couple weeks later, the whole end of my injured finger turned brown and hard and eventually peeled off like a leather thimble. Underneath was a brand new finger, soft and pink like a baby’s… 

On shoot day, our friend Chris Chapman set us up in a beautiful room at this awesome photography space Silverline Studios which basically took the project to a whole new level. It came with a small refrigerator full of coca-cola, which I think, Cameron and the dancer Peng Cherry are still dreaming of. 

​Later, Cameron and I rented a moving van and drove the fully constructed costumes to the shoot space in the dead of night to avoid Toronto traffic. We blasted Classic Rock Q107 all the way there, since there was no iPod jack in the van’s stereo. Here is one of the songs… 

Next is a video from our dress rehearsal starring Peng Cherry and Cameron Tomsett.

The shoot day was a long 12 hour slog. The wonderfully talented Greg Bliskep worked as our DP. We shot one costume at a time, and used a HD video projector to add colourful animations by Toronto Designer Emma O’Neil, on to the while costumes. 

The day after the shoot, faced with the fact that we had no place to store the huge costumes, Dean, Cameron and I ninja kicked them to pieces. Failing to capture video of this event, is probably the greatest regret of my career….

BravoTV Experimental Short: Kingdom of Frogs

Kingdom of Frogs is an adaption of the Aesop's fable the Frog's that Desired a King. The film was my contribution into what was to be a collaborative feature, made of up a series of punk-fables by indie directors based on the stories by Aesop.

The sets and animation were done Winston Hacking and Brett Long of Toronto amazing Exploding Motor Car Collective. The sound track was written by Dean Tzenos, front man for the band Odonis Odonis. The clip was produced by Geoff McLean, Toronto's top commercial and music video producer. 

The film was featured in various festivals worldwide including Contra Vision is Germany. It was the winner of Best Experimental Film prize at Hamilton International Film Festival. 

Storyboards...​