What is the film about?

The panic attack lasted for two days. It woke me up in the night and I said, “My heart is exploding.” I started working on ‘eggshell’ to know myself better. This stop-motion animation is composed of paper cutouts, paint gestures on plastic and sculptures made from cereal boxes.

My work is about compartmentalization, about being an artist or dreamer amid the rigid formal tenets of churches and schools. I make imagery from anxious childhood moments. Feeling scared at night, covers pulled overhead. Trapped between powerful authority figures and propelled down an accepted path of behavior and belief. I make artwork about bullies, hero worship, religious fervor, and yearning.

What influenced it?

Allison Schulnik, Don Hertzfeldt, David Shrigley, Laura Harrison, Alex Goddard, Erik Winkowski, Leonardo da Vinci, Philip Guston

A little background information...

I didn’t work from a script and in fact had no idea where the piece was going at all. My initial kernel was that my grandfather’s ghost was haunting me. He was a powerful man who commanded respect from our community in South Carolina, but he died before I was born. I’ve frequently been compared to him because of the way I look and my sense of humor, so I’ve often felt this sense that he’s both watching over me and stifling me from being myself. As the piece grew, I experienced an odd combination of health anomalies. I started waking up in the middle of the night with panic attacks, and then I suffered a bad concussion on the soccer field. This combination led to a month long period where I simply couldn’t sleep. I spent much time reading in the middle of the night, and then watching the sunrise.These experiences dictated the direction of the film as it shifted into the dreamlike state. From the concrete into the ephemeral. I worked on short musical compositions while I was making the piece. Each section of music or passage of animation became a puzzle piece that I moved and rearranged many times, until arriving at a configuration that felt tenuous but also complete. My wife Cassandra was kind enough to lend me her voice to use, and my friend Josh (Love Science Music) generously recorded the voiceover with us and help me finalize the sound mix.

How was the film made?

I used a canon rebel t4i to shoot all of the individual elements in stop-motion. Occasionally I spliced in bits of iphone footage. The backgrounds and figures are all paper cutouts or paintings on plastic sheeting. Some of the effects are made by digitally different elements on top of each other.