still from 'Marie' by Karen Yasinsky

…a fellow American Academy fellow this year – was a real pleasure, the highlight of the day, a 3.5 minute video she made in 2009 inspired by one of my favorite films, and described by Karen as “…a drawing animation based on a scene from Robert Bresson’s film ‘Au Hasard Balthazar.‘ It is a close-up profile of the character Marie speaking. She looks sad and earnest. Or rather blank. I rotoscoped it which involved saving the scene as a series of jpegs, 30 images per second and then drawing each image using a light box. There are several interruptions to her speaking when the image changes. It moves down and off the page then comes back from the top; it becomes an image made of small squares then changes colors; and finally the squares show the negative images. There are also series when every other image is a different color, moving through the spectrum, with the original black line on white in between. This creates a strobing effect. The sound, by Snacks (Tom Boram and Dan Breen) uses a piece by Brahms, static sounds; tremolo and other sounds to match these interruptions. Brahms plays while she calmly speaks but only partial sounds come out of her mouth. She doesn’t communicate.” (more of the interview)