It has been a long journey. Now, the animation has finally been realized!
Watch it here: https://vimeo.com/200537395
The lyrics are available for reference here: http://kindlyn.wikia.com/wiki/Combustion_2:_I_Am_a_Blind_Man
This work represents the general fear of commitment that people often have, and the idea that we can become so concerned with setting up walls and protecting ourselves that we forget to live.
The protagonist here is in a closed off environment (a house) that is suspended in space. He has isolated himself from all of the world, and plans to stay there indefinitely so that he can always be sheltered. He is horrified of the outside world, and believes that even if he is unhappy, as long as he sits there and waits, adventure will eventually come to him. In complete denial, he ignores the fact that he is suffering from the situation, and convinces himself that anything would be better than leaving his safe haven. So he stays there until the bitter end.
It was our goal to have all of the media merge to create artistic resonance, so the lyrics, the music, and the video represent different facets of this story, along with some allusion to a larger narrative. It is our hope that this work can be enjoyed many times over and still reveal nuance to a critical eye.
Without revealing too much, we now invite you to share below any thoughts, questions, and comments you might have regarding "I Am a Blind Man"!
This animation was funded in part by The Regional Artist Project Grant Consortium, York County Arts Council, and The North Carolina Arts Council. A very hearty "thank you" to those organizations.
Beautiful! I had several favorite scenes! It thought the cup breaking at the beginning was really visually stunning and the blood dripping showed a lot of his apparent suffering. The textures in the tea kettle scenes reminded me of boxes that you leave in a corner and forget about and how they are a kind of stale and lifeless, but you have no intention to move them or open them. The animation of the match was really cool and simple but striking! I also really loved the candles when they were melted and one was extinguished. I really felt the tone of isolation, depression, complacency, and stillness. Awesome video!! -Kiara
ReplyDeleteWhat a great project!! I loved the unconventional (can I say that?) approach you took to animation--charcoal for the candles?? The brush strokes on the man?? SO cool. Textures like those gave everything a very real and tactile feel--even though the story is clearly metaphorical, that textured approach grounded it in a way that made it really relatable. I also looooved the dialogue toward the end. Were the faces drawn on a transparent surface? I thought that created a really neat effect, though at times it was difficult to read the expressions of the characters (hardly the most important thing, but maybe worth a mention). And the music set the tone for isolation perfectly. Super rad!! -- Corrie
ReplyDeleteThe highly anticipated premiere of I am a Blind Man! Stunning originality, a project where the collaborative aspects meld together into a unified whole very nicely. I did get dizzy at points but it also made me feel like I was in the house with the man. The candle flickers were so realistic! The seer was an excellent actor, I could see the depth in his demeanor despite his apparent youth. Definitely a piece that you want to watch again as you can discover more layers with each viewing and also gives you pause and makes you think. Looking forward to seeing more from these young, ambitious, and creative collaborators. A valiant work from very talented artists- it should be at the next Cannes and Sundance and win all the things!
ReplyDeleteBeautifully animated! The artstyle, dim lightened visuals and sad-toned background music really delivered a message of loneliness and self-worth unawareness. Amazing video and execution for a message, never give up and keep on doing more of these!
ReplyDeleteHauntingly beautiful. Sad and somehow sweet. I'm rooting for this man!
ReplyDeleteThe movement of the flames, shadows, and water is captivating and beautiful. The sturdy teapot seemed so real that I could imagine the comfortable, safe feel of it. The message I took away from this piece is: Sometimes you must leave your comfort zone to experience living.
ReplyDeleteMaureen
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ReplyDeleteI think it’s pretty amazing to see the Lyrics, music and animation all come together. They compliment and enhance each other very well. I felt very engaged the throughout the video, it was kind of mesmerizing. (Probably due to the different types of mediums you used to create everything, which is super cool)
DeleteMy favorite part is probably seeing the blood drip from the hand, as if it’s shedding a tear. You could really see/feel the emotion right from the start once the cup breaks as if his soul was shattered. The candles also looked ridiculously good and so did the blind man during the teapot scene.
The dialogue was neat (especially liked the text font you used), but it didn’t really leave me much time to finish reading each sentence before transitioning to the next clip. Felt a little cut off? (I could just be a slow reader though) I also liked how you made the people appear during the dialogue, very cool.
Thoughts on the candles:
DeleteOne can assume they are used to show the passing of time whoever that would only require one candle at most. As there are two candles, I believe one must signify the mind (his mental status) and the other his body (physical status). At 5:06 you can see this dark look of despair on the blind man after reading his (assumed)diary and the cup and bleed seemingly repair themselves which makes me believe this is true about the candles.
Cup and Cut:
Initially I believed the cup to represent the blind man's soul shattering as the cup breaks and the blood from the cut to be his body crying out for help. We see both the cup and cut repairing themselves ~4:30 making us believe he has listened to the seer's words, however due to the protagonist's face I believe this is telling us the blind man thinks he is doing no harm to himself. (broken cup and cut are still there, reparation is just an illusion to both the audience and the man himself.)
One could make the case the protagonist has some sort of mental disorder that goes far beyond depression. Whether he is aware of the self harm he is causing himself or not I do not know (the seer could perhaps be his inner self attempting to help him). This is a very chilling piece amplified from both the music and lyrics, but is also beautiful in the way it is shown.
Initial thoughts:
ReplyDeleteStars are distracting, as is the matte yellow window
Like how cup smashes
In first blind man scene, the blind man is pretty similar to background, and everything is stationary except for him, whereas in second one, he is moving and so is the background, but not the foreground except for the cup.
Also there aren’t shadows on the candles/from the candles anywhere except for on the tabletop and that’s weirding me out
The water in the pot just stops coming out, making it looks like it got sucked back into the pot.
I like the seer/blind man interaction, although I think this is an opportunity to show more about the characters by spending more time on their clothes. I’ve so far been imagining this world to look significantly different from contemporary USA. Why does the blind man have on only pants when inside his house and a shirt on the the scene with the seer? (lol I had to check again, I totally assumed that the blind man would have on shorts because he’s Hayden.)
The shadows on the planets/house don’t line up
Why do the candles melt so quickly?
More paragraphy but not much better thought out thoughts:
The blind man with the pots and water are really satisfyingly rendered (I like the wide marks and contrast on the blind man in particular), and I think, while different, the style used to portray the internally stationary pots and the constantly shifting blind man work fairly well together. However, I’m at least initially put off by the decision to have the background more active and contrasting than the foreground (the canvass-ey moving background and the blind man are both more contrasting and more active than the dark pots and the table). I’m also confused by the decision to make the cup that the blind man appears to fill with hot water (he finishes the action he begins???) move as much as he does, when the other pots are more stationary.
I also found the scene of the blind man extending his hand in order to light the fire underneath the kettle to be jarring in the same scene as the painted (?)/generally more form oriented through shapes of color scene of the blind man and the kettle because it looks so flat in comparison since it’s a single sheet of paper with charcoal as black is the only means of creating value. And it doesn’t change at all, it is merely extended and brought back, like a single piece of paper is. Is it intentional to make it look so much less lifelike than the other scene? I also currently dislike the fade to black between the match being lit and extended and no longer lit and retreating. It seems like a significant amount of time has passed? It seems like we should be paying a lot of attention to the lighting of the fire for some reason, but I can’t figure out what it is. Does the blind man even fill the cup with water? Is he going to put it back? (I don’t think this is the case, since he leaves the frame on the opposite side of the frame as he did when getting/returning with the cup.) (or did he actually finish what he started and made hot water?)
Also, the blind man blowing out and waving on the stove is very appealing.
The candles seem to be some kind of timekeeping illustration, but I can’t make any sense of them because they aren’t keeping time consistently. They don’t change at all for a long time, and then suddenly shrink and then later, apparently after a significant amount of time (due to the fade to black between lighting and retreating from lighting the stove) neither have changed, and one is blown out.
Also, you pay a lot of attention to some lights. It’s obvious that most of the objects you display aren’t just lit by diffused light, but the places the light comes from are inconsistent. The most jarring example of this for me is with the candles. You give each candleholder a lot of detail by showing how light falls on it, but those lights remain, and don’t change, even though the actual flame of the candle moves. You also give each candle a single shadow, each going off the screen in either direction. However, candle would have multiple shadows, if the light was coming not only from the flame of the candle’s flame, but also from its sibling flame. And these flames that move in the animation would make those flames move every frame. You do have one moving circular shadow at the bottom of each candle, but it doesn’t affect either the candleholder or how a real candle’s light would affect nearby objects. It also seems like the background behind the candles would show some change in lighting due to the flame’s movement, if one was being realistic. All of his only seems worth mentioning because of the apparent realism in other aspects of the image, like how much detail goes into the candleholders. I have some level of aesthetic and potentially even moral distaste for drawings that include a lot of smudging due to my academic visual art training, so this may be inaccurate, but I associate smudging with a desire for realism. While keeping in mind that I know I have some potentially irrational dislike of smudging, I think there’s also a better way to handle the background behind the candles. Currently, I’m seeing them just as a way to (maybe) keep time for the video, but I think it would be really cool if it did something else too, like, for example, show the world beyond the house through the window (if it is a window).
ReplyDeleteI get visually bored with the length of the candle scenes and want to be able to attach greater significance to them than I currently do.
(Hopefully this is already understood, but I’m aware that there isn’t time for many/any reworkings for what you’ve already done.)
Also: I’ve had this video playing as I write somewhere between ten and twenty times at this point, and I’ve been aware of this part of the illustration for (I think) years, but I just considered that the blind man could be looking out of a dark window, and not into a mirror, in the first blind man scene.
The movement of the cup breaking and the shadow cup un-breaking is also really visually satisfying, much more so than the images of the bloody hand are for me. I think with the hand, I’m put off by the lack of realism in how the blood behaves, both in how it seems to stay in globs that leave little residue, and in how far that small amount of blood manages to traverse the blind man’s hand. The small amount of blood doesn’t create a nice composition on the stationary hand going down the center of the screen in little dots. On the other hand, the cup is large, its movement is quick and takes up much more space, and I think I find that scene more appealing as a result.
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ReplyDeleteAlso, at least after a few watches of the narrative, I don’t consistently feel like the blind man’s actions are illustrating his indecision, or why to include such scenes like the breaking cup, the blood, and the flat hand lighting stove scene. It seems like these should have some importance due to the amount of time spent on them, but I’m not understanding it. This potentially isn’t even a criticism if this is your intent (because you didn’t bother to finish any of these narratives, since you’re being like a blind man?) but if your intent is to create a narrative that makes sense, I’m at least not getting it yet.
ReplyDeleteEspecially because of the reversal of the cup breaking and the blood coming out of the hand, it seems like there is metaphorical significance to these things that transcends just “this cup broke and my hand might hurt because I cut it when trying to pick it up, but then I didn’t bother finishing picking it up.” The blood represents pain, like already mentioned? Is the cup merely the vehicle to get that pain to exist? Is the breaking of the cup inconsequential?
Okay maybe I should move on to something else.
I think both in terms of visual style/animation, placement within the narrative, and also understandability, the scene with the seer and the blind man is my fav. All the shots of that include a kind of (this is totally unhelpful as a description) spindly style that I’ve begun to associate with your visual work and also I think in general it’s the most consistent scene, which maybe is something you’re trying to avoid. I don’t know. But this scene contained a lot of movement, especially with the seer, and made him appear especially lifelike, while also using text both as narrative and visually as another set of lines that are different from those of the living men. While these word-lines don’t move constantly like the people, they do get written out, which leads them to have enough movement to be consistent for me.
Right after this, the cup is remade and the blood is gone again. Is this intended to show the change in the blind man from being blind to be willing to invest in one thing?
(I don’t think this would fit with the music, but this is all I can think of that would lead to a change in the blind man’s actions like has apparently occurred, given that he finishes making water.)
The techniques used here are used inconsistently (using all pastels/charcoal for scenes like the candles and blind man looking out window (?) vs. blind man scene two, that has three different visual styles on different planes in the shot) but the inconsistency isn’t used consistently enough to make it cohesive. (Which, again, may be your intent.) I have little understanding of the space that the blind man occupies, although we see him and objects in his small house several times, but we don’t see anything in relation to each other. I’m not even sure if the candles are intended to be next to the wall or not.
This piece has a very haunting beauty to it. While many people will believe that they can take the isolation and lack of socialization, anyone who has experienced loneliness for a period will tell you that the mind is your worst enemy.
ReplyDeleteTo me the seer that the man happens upon is his own inner monologue, trying to convince him that he is strong and can carry the burden of his isolation. Yet by the end I feel he loses his mind, and that it is symbolized by his delusions of the teacup fixing itself as well and his wound healing. I also think the two candles symbolize both his mental and physical well-being, and when the mental candle is extinguished, he has lost that part of himself.
Overall a chilling, yet thought provoking experience.
My amateur analysis and thoughts on symbolism:
ReplyDeleteI'm skipping the cup shattering and him cutting his finger and the candles to jump to the image of him in front of the window staring out. I thought this scene was particularly striking, and it does a couple of things on a few different levels (maybe). The lyrics say:
"There’s a thirty thousand kilometer gap between the world and my reflection through the window."
But the circular object in the window doesn't appear to be 'the world' or even a planet at all. It looks like the reflection of a light source in the room he's in. We can also see that his back is lit, and the reflection in the window is back-lit as well (having edge-light around his shoulders, face, and arms). So supposedly he's looking out the window at the world, but all he sees is the emptiness of space - aka the void aka infinite darkness, just like a blind man would. The reflection of himself in the window is also dark, as it would be IRL, but I'm struck by how his eyes in the reflection are completely shadowed. There isn't even a glimmer of reflective light in them. The window, acting as a mirror, reminds me of the passage in 1st Corinthians:
"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. *For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.*"
The next major image is of the protagonist setting water to boil, only, the flame is too small. He almost seems afraid. He takes a little black book (which itself has negative connotations of illicit secrets) that seems to be a diary of sorts. He's reading from it, as his saccades show, but the next scene would lead one to believe he was writing in it, due to the way the text appears slowly, going from left to right. He recounts an encounter with a "curious man", claiming that the man "calls himself a seer" despite the man never saying such. The man says:
"You are . . . a good man. You have a strength and a fire in you . . . and you will never let fear take hold of you."
Our protagonist seems puzzled, and asks the seer why he would say such a thing, to which the seer replies, "It seems you didn't know."
We're then shown another shot of the candles, which seem to melt ever-so-slightly before cutting to our protagonist making coffee or tea or some drink for himself that contains a black grainy ingredient. He blows out the pilot light that supposedly boiled the water for his drink and walks past the two candles, which have since burnt down further, and one flickers out as he passes.
We're then shown him closing the diary, the blood from the cut he received earlier (when he tried to pick up his broken cup) is shown to reverse itself, flowing back into him but *the cut itself doesn't heal*. Then we're shown the pieces of shattered cup coming together as though reassembling itself, but what we're left with is a shadowy image of the cup - the real cup remains broken.
Our protagonist seems to meditate on the seer's words, swirling his drink around in his cup before upturning his cup (dumping out what's left of the black ingredient) onto his little plate. He then stares into the now empty cup, his eyes fixating on the black debris that still clings to the cups interior. The camera zooms in on an X shaped marking. Our protagonist is shown with a troubled look on his face, his eyes still on the X inside the cup.
The final shot is of the house, still drifting through space, passing a huge planet before becoming lost in its shadow.
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DeleteThe cup shattering at the beginning seems to be symbolic of our protagonist's normal everyday routine, his comfort zone, being disrupted by some outside force (implied by the cup on the windowsill of all places and the way the camera zoomed in through the window.) Our protagonist tries to pick up the cup, but is cut and begins bleeding. He then forgoes picking up the broken cup. In fact, he never does over the course of the movie. He instead adopts a new cup (the one we see him actually using.)
The act of him fixing his drink seems almost like a ritual. Maybe its meant to calm his nerves or is symbolic of the little bit of control he feels he has over his life. The lyrics also suggest this, "Here I can breathe. Here I can call a truce and wait for something to arrive. I know, a dazzling world will surely come to me. The world will surely come for me."
The candles are a source of light, and light is symbolic of good and knowledge. Why there are two I cannot say, but the gradual burning down (and snuffing out) of the candle(s) would seem to indicate the further descent into darkness.
I also think the final shot is significant in that sense, as he is moving away from the sun (the light) and into darkness.
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True to the creator's intention, our protagonist seems afraid. The slightest hardship or setback is enough to discourage him (as evidenced by the broken cup / finger cutting scene) and his mind constantly harbors self-doubt (as evidenced by his recalling the exchange with the seer.) The creator even says, "In complete denial, he ignores the fact that he is suffering from the situation, and convinces himself that anything would be better than leaving his safe haven."
I would go a step further though and posit that our protagonist is intentionally engaging in (what will amount to) self-destruction. It isn't just that he is ignoring the problem or convincing himself that everything is OK - he is suffering from a terrible mindset that goes beyond depression in that *he is fully conscious of his actions and their consequences*. Remember what the seer told him when he asked why the seer said what he said: "It *seems* you didn't know."
He gave the seer the impression he did because that was the impression he *wanted* to give. Our protagonist *knows* that he has that inner strength, that inner fire, and that he is a good person, but he is choosing otherwise. He wants to be miserable.
(That might seem ridiculous, but such people exist. You'll know them the instant you see them. They telegraph how miserable they are without words or actions. You can see it in their face, their posture, their eyes (if they ever meet yours, they'll quickly dart away and down.) Misery rolls off them in waves and permeates the air around them. It's a terrible state of existence, made even more terrible by their willingness to be in it.)
I thought the passage from 1 Corinthians was apt because that chapter concerns itself with love. Our protagonist must not love himself, or has a degree of self-loathing that is stifling his potential (trapping him in his home.) He is still a child, metaphorically. He still has growing to do, and it will be painful. For now he sees through a glass, darkly, but in the end he will see clearly. And if I'm not mistaken, there are two kinds of blind people: those unable to see (due to misfortune and circumstance) and those who refuse to (until it becomes too painful not to.)
The mixture of animation styles not only gives the film a uniqueness but also nicely emphasizes the uncertainty of the man and the overall narrative. The music does a good job of setting the tone of the piece without necessarily needing to rely on it to tell the story, which clearly exists in the visuals. I do wish I could have heard the lyrics a bit clearer at the beginning because the ones I could hear I found quite lovely. Overall very impressed!
ReplyDeleteA chilling and profoundly stunning piece. The music and lyrics complement the theme and feel of the animation beautifully. Parts that struck me most included 1) the Blind Man cutting himself on the smashed cup, which to me parallels how picking up your own pieces is often as painful as it is necessary, and 2) how dramatic his mindset changed on meeting "The Seer," despite his persistent isolation and the lack of physical change in his circumstances. I've watched twice and gleaned something new from each experience, and foresee this being the case when watching multiple times over due to its capitalization on many opportunities for symbolism along with openness for interpretation. Thank you for sharing and hope to see more of your work in the future!
ReplyDelete