Great artists often take advantage of the unusual challenges in life. Take, for example, the case of Anna Samo, the resourceful director of the Oscar short-listed The Wild-Tempered Clavier, who used toilet paper to create a lovely animated short. “I had my inspiration during the first wave of the pandemic in New York City, and toilet paper became a valuable commodity,” she tells Animation Magazine. “The idea came from my fascination with camera-less animation. Though I never had a chance to experiment with drawing or scratching on film stock, I like the thought of the uncertainty and the loss of control that comes with it.”
She adds, “As an animator you have to focus in a very different way working directly on film — there is no way to check the animation and the frames are never underneath each other, always next to each other. You have to create a substantial amount of animation before you can watch it. And there is no “undo” button — you have to accept the possibility of making a mistake and work around it.”
Samo decided to build her own version of an editing table and used toilet paper as the film stock. “It was my reaction to everything that was in the air — the uncertainty, the erratic human behavior and the overwhelming feeling of being lost,” she recalls. “I combined painting on toilet paper with a prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach. I liked the juxtaposition of the most perishable everyday object with the music that has been around for 300 years. I wanted to spend time with the music, hold onto its beauty in the tumult of momentary dramas and I wanted to play around with the materials at hand while creating the animation.”
The Uncertainty Principle
The first animation tests for the short were made in March of 2020, and the project was finally completed this past April. “My hands were my most important animation tools,” she admits. “I work directly under the camera lens and use Dragonframe software and Nikon D800 camera. The rest was very analog. For this film, I created my set of rules, which helped me imitate the process of animating directly on film stock. For example, didn’t use the onion skin while painting the animation, and I didn’t watch the animation in progress until an entire roll of toilet paper was completely filled with images.”
The artist is also quick to credit the gifted people who helped her on the project. “Most of the time it was just me alone in my studio, but I was also fortunate to work with some very kind and talented people,” she days. “Daniel Regenberg performed and recorded the music, Tom Bergmann did the production (and endured all kind of moods I went trough during those four years), Andrea Martignoni worked on the sound design. Olivier Catherin and Marc Faye managed the post production phase, and Yan Volsy did the sound mix and Julien Rougier, the color grading.”
The Russian-born director, whose previous works include Obon (2019) and Conversations with a Whale (2021), says it was quite challenging to proceed with the project without having a storyboard or a clear message in the beginning. “The idea was to grow the film during the process of making it without a preconceived plan,” says Samo. “I followed the feeling that I need to animate another roll of toilet paper, and then another and another. I did not edit the footage for a long time, as I was not ready to commit to specific form and shape. So more often than not, I was in panic, because the time was passing and I still could not explain what my film was about. I started making the film out of the desire to play, but the world around me was getting ever gloomier. Accepting uncertainty into the creative process was nerve-wracking but it did pay off at the end.”
“I left Russia nearly twenty years ago, but I still have family and friends living there,” Samo adds. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine became a sore spot in conversations with my parents and I have seen many friends and fellow artists faced with the difficult choice to leave their country or to stay and to adjust to the new reality. And there I was, sitting in my studio and painting on toilet paper. As the animation progressed, a theme crept in: An artist tries to play as a war is raging somewhere — abstract at first, before it actually enters their realm.”
Looking back, the director says she knew allowing herself to wander around and let the narrative grow by itself was the right approach. “Somewhere in the background the film was shaping itself in its own time,” says Samo. “And once I felt ready to sit down and edit the footage, it took me less than three days to find the structure and the meaning. For the first time in two years, I could say without twitching that I had a film. Accepting uncertainty into the creative process was nerve racking but it did pay off at the end.”
Triumphant Music
Samo, who mentions Gil Alkabetz, Yuri Norstein, Caroline Leaf, Michaela Pavlatova and Elizabeth Hobbs as some of her animation influences, hopes that audiences will have their own stories and associations when they watch The Wild-Tempered Clavier. “I also hope they feel like the music wins at the end,” she notes. “I am happy that the film feels fresh to me, even though I spent so much time making it. Every time I watch it with the audience, I discover a new idea or interpretation that makes sense to me and it feels like the film doesn’t belong to me, it lives its own life.”
Her next project also sounds quite innovative: It’s a stop-motion short about friendship and electricity! “It’s a new challenge for me, since I never worked with puppets,” Samo says. “But I really like the story and the characters, and I am curious to see where this road will take me!” We’ll be waiting patiently.
Watch the trailer below:
For more info, visit samo-animation.com.
