password: rope
Undrawn, 2010 – 2016
Stop motion animation film
Music: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92: II Allegretto played by the London Symphony Orchestra & Josef Krips
8:51
Undrawn is a stop motion animation film that explores the process of drawing. The film starts out with completed drawings of a rope, attached to an unknown source, with a ball that cozily hangs at the base of the rope. The ball’s fate seems fine until we see that the edges of drawings are unfinished and the rope’s edges are frayed.
The first portion of the film shows, step-by-step, the creation of a drawing through mark making, shading, and erasing. This mark making enlivens and animates the rope and ball. The film’s text, in French rather than English, allows the artist (a native English speaker) to draw words as well as write them. As gravity takes hold and an unknown explosion takes place near the rope, a tear in the rope worsens, leading to the eventual rip and free fall of the ball into an unknown white space. After the ball lands, its motion through space, free of the rope, begins. While it travels, the drawings become further and further undone and the ball emerges fully formed, on a beach, in a photographic space. From there the ball travels to sights, as a human would, but still as a drawing and not a “real” ball. At the end of the film, the drawn ball’s journey continues out of the frame, its future a mystery. Allegretto is the second section of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. The film shows the ball in the middle of its story as well. We never see the ball’s beginning or where it ends up.