A still from Hanging By A Thread
ristic landscapes depicted in the paintings as well as the actual "Freaks" in them. So, without being consciously aware of it, these paintings had become story boards that led to "Hanging By A Thread", the first in a trilogy plus an upcoming feature.
I really admire Jan Svankmajer's work. He is a surrealist filmmaker from Prague who combines stop-motion animation with live action and who is also an accomplished artist. His films inspired my first film, "The Reading", where I combined live action and stop motion as a metaphor for "going down the rabbithole".
In your statement you say " I aim to enlighten and entertain the viewer while emphasizing the importance of one’s imagination in a chaotic and mystifying world." Could you comment on this sentence? Your production is very miscellaneous: how has your production processes changed over the years?
Could you tell us a particular episode who has helped the birth of this video, or simply an epiphany, a sudden illumination? Even while I was shooting my first stop-motion animated short "The Reading", I thought of what my next film with the "Clothespin Freaks" could be like. "The Reading" ends with one whimsical "Clothespin Freak" leaving its alternate reality to enter ours. This was significant because it indicated that there were more adventures with the "Clothespin Freaks" on the horizon.
We live in the Age of Information. Therefore, we are constantly bombarded with new facts and stimuli. It is wonderful to be able to receive knowledge all the time but it is also very overwhelming and confusing. How can we possibly make sense of it all and not get lost in the chaos? In order to make some sort of sense of one's existence in all of this, I believe that we need to trust our inner voices more than ever before. We have to find that little spark in us.
In "The Reading" I had used as a backdrop some of my paintings from the series, "Button In The Garden of Earthly Delights". At some point during the filming I realized that it would be very intriguing to bring to life these lush, futu-
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