The atmosphere of Vanessa King’s animated short, Behind Your Eyes, is vivid yet ephemeral, and parallels the fleeting experience of creating the film itself. King, who is a recent graduate of MICA’s animation program, uses animation as a way of journeying through the moments of life that cannot be captured, or the moments that remind us there is as much beauty in trial and process, as there is in wholeness. King created the film entirely using paint-on-glass techniques, and uses the looseness of painting to find new, emotional direction in her art that the rigidity of commercial animation or illustration limits.
While this type of experimental animation involves tactile, traditional craftsmanship, Vanessa King also explores its form in the context of cutting-edge digital art and design, an example of which was honored in the Maryland Film Festival Bumper (2016), where a 2D-animated character can be seen entering and discovering a new fluid, painted dimension. King’s artwork is a synthesis of loose and tight styles, displaying a dynamic, harmonized relationship between flow and restraint. King anticipates exploring both traditional and experimental animation in the future, and in our interview she opens up about the technique, inspiration, and processes that drove her milestone animated short, Behind Your Eyes.
Q: Tell us about your background in the arts. What led you to animation?
VK: As a child, I was inspired by video games, anime, fantasy worlds, and heroes, which motivated me to study animation, concept art, and illustration. I began at community college, taking figure drawing and fine arts, as well as game arts and animation classes. Once I was set on doing art, I enrolled in MICA, originally in illustration, but then in animation when I found the latter allowed me to explore motion and figure in an expression similar to dance, which is another of my interests. I have always felt a relationship between music and the pictures I create and see in my head, and believe that animation can give life to this experience.
Animation also allows you to design characters and atmosphere, and invest in your animated world in a way that gives movement to it, unlike in illustration, where a single image dominates. The act of animating is really fun, and in it the journey is emphasized as much as the destination. My favorite art movement is Impressionism because I like mood, and how ambiguity is left to the audience. The Impressionist style inspired some of my painting styles, but in the future I would like to create paint-on-glass with realism styles as well.
Q: What draws digital animators to tactile paint-on-glass experimentation?
VK: While 2D animation has great precision, I know that I get caught up on individual frames, (even the ones no one will really see!) Since I can go back and edit, I tend to overindulge and get stuck editing. I do like how clean and consistent characters look in 2D animation. Paint-on-glass has looseness, forces you to keep going, and is an intuitive way to animate. In 2D, you can get caught up in the quality of the lineart, but in painting animation you can work with blocks and shapes, moving it as you would a physical object. My sumi ink painting class inspired me to create paint-on-glass, as it helped me balance minimalism and economy of stroke with getting down the mood. Creating with the minimum amount of lines you need, is usually all of what you need most of the time.
One concern is that stop-motion is already a niche within animation, so paint-on-glass is a niche within a niche. While I love paint-on-glass and feel the need to create with my whole body, there are financial barriers to the paint-on-glass set-up. For now I use digital tools such as a tablet until I have the opportunity to return to paint-on-glass.
Q: How did you work with destructive editing processes while creating Behind Your Eyes?
VK: As I progressed through the film, each painting would eventually be gone, and I would paint over on top of every single one. I would keep little thumbnails on the side so I would know what composition I would want, but I was open to where it would go. Any mistakes I made, or brushstrokes I didn’t like, didn’t need to be too deeply accounted for. Paint-on-glass was a way for me to let go of perfectionism, to go by feeling and still have it display the mood I want, without getting overly technical or detail-oriented.
I start the process with color scripts. I ended up finding that I liked using warm and cool purples, yellows, and desaturated tones to represent the ocean, instead of vibrant blue. I wanted the contrast of the character going through the animation to reflect in the color. Textures were also considered, for example, in the bathtub scene where shimmers of light reflected on the paint and blue-green colors conveyed the wet and dark environment. Though they came after the animatic stage, the use of painterly transitions helped to complete the film.
In the beginning I saw my process as being no different from 2D, just with a different feel, but as I continued to work I realized the physicality of my work and began to incorporate stop-motion techniques, such as using photographic lighting to change the highlights and drop shadows on the brushstrokes.
Q: How is the outcome of the process different from your initial vision, both in story and technique?
VK: Usually, artists do not or should not work chronologically because a result of this is seeing the artist improving or changing their style as the film progresses. But, it made sense for the subject matter of my film, and the paint-on-glass technique. I began the film with the story of tackling depression, and of wanting something, but not really existing. My intent was to capture the feelings of detachment in depression, and of wanting something that is undefined. As I struggled with perfectionism in coming up with the story, I then decided to document an episode of depression that happened in adolescence, but found it hard to recapture a feeling or moment from the past instead of the present. My story became that of trying, and the beauty of trying. I wanted that to be reflected in the chronological way the painting took shape.
I had to cut scenes for lack of time, for example, the scene with the girl looking into the TV originally transitioned into another scene. My intention was to have the girl be physically weightless instead of just emotionally weightless, and I accomplished this most in the scene where she slides out of the overflowing bathtub. I also began the film balancing the darker moments with humor, but deviated from this angle as I worked further on the film. I would have liked to push some of my original ideas more, but the finished film still fit together without these elements.
Q: What did you learn while creating a paint-on-glass film, and what advice would you give to other artists?
VK: Critiquing a finished paint-on-glass work is difficult, since the artist can’t just go back and do it again. After going through five or six iterations of my story, I didn’t know what it was anymore, so I could not always explain to other people what it was, even in animatic form. I wanted to see my vision through nevertheless. I’ve learned that you want to be able to convey things to people completely throughout the whole process, for them to have faith in you. It was a struggle at first – I think people must have had blind faith in me! – but in the end I was happy with how my film turned out.
It is good to take a break from your work – while working on a single frame or scene for hours, you’re shackled to it. After seeing Behind Your Eyes at Sweaty Eyeballs Showcase after not seeing it for months, I found connections I did not notice before, and felt satisfied with my work. Animation is a balance of time and necessity, because there will never be enough time for anything, and if you can get the point across, in little strokes if you can, it’s just as valuable and poignant as rendering it to its fullest abilities.
As for advice, I believe it’s important to get your art as unfiltered as you can. Sometimes we like to hammer our vision down to make it more palatable for other people, but there is a lot of beauty in rawness, emotion, and struggle. I encourage artists to stay true to what they want, to find a unique style of expression that does not censor themselves. What is the point of creating art if you yourself do not like it, or want to create it? This also means it is important for artists to have a balance of how much they create for themselves, with how often they gain value sharing art with other people. Art gives value to my personal life because it is cathartic and allows me to know other people. It is up to the individual how much they feel they want to create for themselves versus others.
Q: Thank you so much Vanessa! What types of art can we look forward from you in the future?
VK: Right now I am in a crossroads of making commercial art or creating more projects for myself. I definitely want to make more personal, narrative-based short films in an abstracted, “inside-your-head” kind of story. I want to keep using motifs of dance and music, just as I had the sound of the ocean going in and out in mind when I created Behind Your Eyes. Dance and music are natural parts of me. Right now, I have been interested in capturing moments with quick lines and I really enjoy discreetly sketching people in public. Regarding a long-term project, I have been working on a secret piece that explores the setting of a circus to underline the feelings of perfectionism found in performance. I am excited for this project since it incorporates a lot of my interests including dance, music, and story.
See more from Vanessa at her website, vanessabking.com