"Transfigured" experimental fine-art animation (Shadbolt paintings)
“...A mind-dazzling, sight-and-sound roller-coaster ride that leaves viewers gasping with amazement.” This 35-mm film brings the viewer into the world of Jack Shadbolt, the innovative and influential Canadian painter. Filmmaker Stephen 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 plunking the monitor under an Oxberry animation camera.
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. A reviewer of the Vancouver International Film Festival said:
"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
"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
Silver Award - Category: Animation, Expo of Short Film and Video, 1999, New York
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Director: Stephen Arthur
Animation: Stephen Arthur
Producers: Stephen Arthur, George Johnson
Executive producer: Svend-Erik Eriksen
Sound editing: Stephen Arthur, Jean-Luc Perron
Original musical score: Jean-Luc Perron (commissioned for the film)
Paintings were transformed from the originals and used by kind permission of Jack Shadbolt (who died in 1998).
Copyright © 1998 National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The NFB no longer distributes or sells this film. The only copies are ageing VHS videocassettes in public library special-collection reference sections for “historical video.” As this film has long been unavailable from authorized sources, the originator, co-producer, and animator of the film, Stephen Arthur, has posted a video of Transfigured here as fair use to memorialize, preserve, and rescue the experience and cultural phenomenon. The film shown here was digitized from a VHS videocassette transfer of the original widescreen 35-mm film.
http://transcanfilm.com/xenos/Transfigured_guide.pdf
http://transcanfilm.com/xenos/SXA-Resume-Filmmaker.pdf
