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| Evan
Mather is an independent filmmaker and animator based
in Los Angeles. His eclectic body of work has screened at the Sundance
Film Festival, South by Southwest, the International Film Festival
Rotterdam, Seoul Net Festival, and the One Reel Film Festival –
as well as profiled in RES, Sight & Sound, Wired, Newsweek, Senses
of Cinema, and The New York Times. He has been a guest lecturer at
UCLA and MIT and the subject of a retrospective at the Seattle Art
Museum. |
| IMDb
| Wikipedia
| PDF |
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| "Why would a grown
man play with action figures?" |
| by
Kirk Hostetter |
| Many of us love movies, we love
to watch them and talk about them and even write about them.
A few of us love to make them too. But not many live to make
them – Evan is one of those not many. He’s constantly
working on something, and constantly coming up with ideas of
what to do next. Read a newspaper article? Turn it into a movie.
See a wacky guy on the street? Turn it into a movie. Take a
trip to the desert? Turn it into a movie. Hear a story? Turn
it into a movie. See a movie? Turn it into another movie. Evan
made Super 8 movies as a kid (the earliest in his filmography
is from 1981 when he was 12 years old), but it was this impetus
- to turn a movie into another movie - coupled with the onset
of the ongoing digital revolution, that allowed him to combine
two of his passions, Star Wars and animation. |
| With these original digital
parodies, stop action, illustration, action figures, and sampled
and original dialogue and sounds, were downloaded, scanned,
composed, and merged in the virtual computer world. And, most
significantly, distributed, via the Internet, to all seven continents.
These are concept movies, and none are going to change the world.
But so what? Even those critical of these creations must recognize
moments of inspired originality: naked Barbie
dolls floating through space; a boxing
nun kicking Godzilla’s ass; and
a television station dedicated to showing two men slapping one
another 24 hours a day. With these Star Wars shorts Evan
gathered a bit of a following, had a lot of fun, but more importantly
mastered his technical tools, in this case his video camera
and his software, to put himself in position to create animation
work that has been progressively more accomplished. Buena
Vista Fight Club,
Fansom the Lizard, and a music video for
Aimee Mann’s "Red
Vines", all truly original animated short
digital films, utilize a hand-created aesthetic, keep one foot
in that 8mm past, and refine Evan’s world of whimsy, unpredictability
and charming absurdity. |
| The absurdity has been there
since the beginning. Pinecone
from 1991, tells the brief story of a young man who’s
told, indirectly, by a pinecone with the voice of Ronald Reagan,
to run over everyone he sees with his VW Bug. It’s stupid,
clever, and its fun to watch. It’s another pre-Star Wars
piece, though, that to me represents the most interesting thread
that passes through Evan’s work. |
| Sightings
is a 25 second dramatization, or not, that documents two men
who have witnessed a UFO, or not. It’s a dramatization
because the title text tells us so, but it’s not because
one man tells us: “we are not actors, we are real people.”
This blurring of the line between the real and the |
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| unreal, the navigation through layers
of truth and fiction and back again, is intrinsic to the cinema, especially
that which is digital and liquid, but with Evan it’s always
a question, always part of the subtext, and it takes on many faces.
It can be blunt and simple, as it is in Sightings;
reflexive, as it is in the Star Wars parodies; literal as it is in
Buena Vista Fight Club (those are real cartoons beating
unreal humans to pieces that re-form into a virtual Frankenstein);
indistinguishable and wandering as it is in Fansom the Lizard
(it’s the story of a false story of a true event); misleading
as it is in Vert, Airplane
Glue and Icarus of Pittsburgh;
and it can be, well…are Aimee Mann’s eyebrows really like
that? |
| Alternate realities come easy to children, and perhaps
here lies the true reason for the toy action figures, the young boy’s
dreams of what Fansom might be doing in Las Vegas, and the accomplished
handmade aesthetic: these subjects and methods offer a natural connection
to a place, a past where making up stories and playing out fantasies
is not only accepted, but condoned. This fascination with looking
back, with mining the past, is something that I have come to realize
the two of us have in common. The three shorts that Evan and I have
made together (Vert, Airplane Glue,
and Icarus of Pittsburgh), each include characters
that in some fashion feel the need to retrace old tracks, to regain
something lost, to somehow make tangible a memory they still own,
or a person they can no longer talk to. |
| But capturing images is fighting time, so, whether
by way of snapshots or home movies, we all do it. Only with Evan’s
work it’s about fighting both time and what it inevitably steals
from our childhood sensibilities. |
| Co-creator of the “Trilogy
of Tragedy” (Vert, Airplane Glue , and Icarus of Pittsburgh),
Kirk Hostetter is a Seattle
architect and movie lover who also runs 24framespersecond.com. |
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| Top 10 |
| Listed in chronological order
that I first watched them, thereby impacting my film style and aesthetic.
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| A quick recipe for garlic mashed potatoes |
| Peel and cube two pounds of russet
potatos. Place in a medium-sized pot and cover with cold water. Add
eight to ten or even twelve peeled and trimmed pieces of whole garlic.
Bring to a rolling boil. Turn down to low heat and cover the pot.
Go watch television for about twenty or twenty-five or even thirty
minutes. Drain the potatoes in one of those metal things called a
colander. Place the drained potatoes and garlic back in the pot and
stir while adding about one-quarter cup of sour cream, one-tablespoon
of soft room temperature butter, and a little bit of whole milk. Stir
until it reaches a consistency not unlike mud. Salt and pepper to
taste. |
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