What do you get when you combine a Grammy Award-winning violinist, a world-renowned composer on a hacked piano, and an incredible Brooklyn-based stop-motion animator? Only the awesomest handicraft tide pool on the Internet.
Grammy winning American violinist Hilary Hahn and German modernist composer Hauschka recently collaborated to produce Silfra—an album combining the violinist's virtuoso talents and the composer's "prepared piano." That is, a piano that has been modified to strike various implanted objects—bottle caps, bells, and other miscellanea— rather than the intended chords. The track "Bounce Bounce" is what inspired animator Hayley Morris to create this video.
"I really wanted to capture the energetic and spontaneous feeling of the song itself, and honor the collaboration between Hilary Hahn and Hauschka," Morris told IFC Fix. "When Hauschka performs he takes different recognizable objects and places them into his piano to alter the sound. I wanted to take the same approach as the music's creation and have the materials themselves create a narrative and look." Morris employed a variety of found and recycled materials—from doilies to driftwood—to construct the underwater scene, then added the lighting effects by hand.
"For each scene I animated about 10 objects at once frame by frame including the shadows that move across the shot," Morris added. "I like my work to be tactile and textured and for my art work to pick up the light in interesting ways." No computer effects whatsoever were used in the film's production. [IFC via Cartoon Brew]