Transfigured (Jack Shadbolt's paintings animated) - 35mm to VHS

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“...A mind-dazzling, sight-and-sound roller-coaster ride that leaves viewers gasping with amazement.” – Paula Gustafson, Artichoke magazine

This 35-mm film brings the viewer into the world of Jack Shadbolt, the innovative and influential Canadian painter. Filmmaker Stephen X. Arthur animates Shadbolt’s paintings, creating an entirely new work of art on film.

Pushing the limits of 2D animation on a PC in 1996, Arthur reconstructs the missing backgrounds behind the cut-out foreground objects of Shadbolt’s paintings. By using a cause-and-effect sequence of actions and by visually matching the moving forms from one painting to the next, Arthur creates a contiguous environment, a surreal world made from Shadbolt’s paintings. The events are choreographed in movement phrases, with synchronized sound effects, to help the viewer follow the fast flow of unusual transformations. This digital animation of scanned images was recorded to 35mm film by placing the computer monitor under the NFB's Oxberry animation camera and manually shooting it frame by frame.

The making of Transfigured is featured in The Animation Bible by Maureen Furniss, 2008. The film premiered in the Official Competition of the Hiroshima '98 International Animation Festival in Japan (director in attendance), followed by the Official Competition of the 1998 World Film Festival in Montreal and the Ottawa '98 International Animation Festival, and the Vancouver International Film Festival 1998.

"The real standout is Transfigured, Stephen Arthur's astonishing celebration of Jack Shadbolt's paintings. In six minutes flat, the computer-aided animator brings 80 tableaux to wide-screen life, achieving a degree of plastic beauty previously obtained only by NFB superstar Norman McLaren." -- Mark Harris, The Georgia Straight: Vancouver's News & Entertainment Weekly, Oct. 1998

"Unique... hallucinatory... an intense reflection on the vision of decay and rebirth that inspires Shadbolt's art." - POV Magazine

"Transfigured's images twist, stretch, and transform themselves from one hallucinatory vision to another, many representing different aspects of the West Coast. The result is a direct, jolting wire to the brain: on repeated viewing, your mind interprets the wild colours and shapes as different objects or creatures, with a different viewing experience hitting you each time. It feels like cinema at its purest, causing you to react to the images that evolve in front of you at 24 frames per second, without the rigid imposition of scripts, sets, or actors." -- Emru Townsend, Montreal Mirror, 1998

"The soundscape for Stephen Arthur's film reminds me of Jack's energy. The crashes, the cymbal sounds and the eeriness, this kind of mysterious force of life -- that's what Jack was all about. The seeds, the pupae, the bursting energy of growth, and the transformation. The energy of life is really what his subject was, and of course that life has a darker side, but he had a very yea-saying imagery and even the dark side was positive." -- Xisa Huang, 1998, co-owner of Bau-Xi Gallery, which represented Shadbolt for almost 30 years

"This film is a true work of art. It's a masterpiece." -- Jack Shadbolt, April 1998

"I am astonished by how Stephen Arthur has, by a kind of psychochemisty, penetrated the very image-making process which I have developed in my painting, to produce exactly its dynamic complexity. This animation is not only about my work visually, but it's as though I were producing it in actuality." -- Jack Shadbolt, 1998

Award for Best Musical Score in an Animated Production (Jean-Luc Perron), Leo Awards 2000, Vancouver, Canada

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in The VHS Vault

Licence or status

The Internet Archive states none for this item.

Credit

Stephen X. Arthur

Language

English

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Kids profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed