The film contains about 43,250 drawings. I used Adobe Animate for the animation and drew everything by hand with a digital stylus on a medium sized Wacom tablet.
North of Blue began in February 2012 when I was invited to be filmmaker-in-residence for a month at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson, City, Yukon, 173 miles (278 km) from the Arctic Circle. Dawson was the site of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1896. The first thing I learned was that my parka was completely inadequate, so my host lent me a fire engine red, Canada Goose parka that was crazy warm, comfortable and filthy. Everyday I would walk around Dawson, along the frozen Klondike and Yukon Rivers and into the woods. Locals knew the parka and often I would be greeted with "How's the parka?"
I photographed the environment and began animating snow, ice, braided rivers, spindly trees and crows. I layered images and experimented with using photos as long, horizontal backgrounds that I could pan under the animation. One day my hosts took me on a drive up the Dempster Highway. This is the most northern road in the world and no highways intersect it. The views of this vast wilderness dotted with jagged white peaks, tiny black trees and lakes of turquoise ice were completely mesmerizing and I fell under the spell of the far north.
After a month in the Yukon, I returned to my studio in Portland, Oregon and struggled for six months to make sense of what I had created. I kept adding new scenes and moving scenes around but nothing worked and nothing coalesced. Finally, I abandoned the project. I came back to it months later and began by removing all the browns and greens and reducing the palette to blue, white and black. I experimented and deconstructed the animation by extracting small elements from semi-realistic scenes and combining them into new compositions. Suddenly it became an abstract film and I continued to pare down each scene to only lines and shapes, like simple blue balls and abstract totemic aggregations.
I photographed the environment and began animating snow, ice, braided rivers, spindly trees and crows. I layered images and experimented with using photos as long, horizontal backgrounds that I could pan under the animation. One day my hosts took me on a drive up the Dempster Highway. This is the most northern road in the world and no highways intersect it. The views of this vast wilderness dotted with jagged white peaks, tiny black trees and lakes of turquoise ice were completely mesmerizing and I fell under the spell of the far north.
After a month in the Yukon, I returned to my studio in Portland, Oregon and struggled for six months to make sense of what I had created. I kept adding new scenes and moving scenes around but nothing worked and nothing coalesced. Finally, I abandoned the project. I came back to it months later and began by removing all the browns and greens and reducing the palette to blue, white and black. I experimented and deconstructed the animation by extracting small elements from semi-realistic scenes and combining them into new compositions. Suddenly it became an abstract film and I continued to pare down each scene to only lines and shapes, like simple blue balls and abstract totemic aggregations.
I have made six abstract short films and an abstract iOS app (Clam Bake). Discarding representation in my work has definitely increased the joy level of my animation. When we see objects, we often subconsciously label them and that creates a familiarity that can shut down further visual and intellectual exploration. Abstract animation cannot be labelled and categorized by the brain. This puts off some people and they are not willing to look at it. We must keep looking and stay open, observing the broad view and examine the details. If you are willing to relax into North of Blue and just look, I think you will be surprised.
Sound designer and composer Jamie Haggerty threw himself into this project. We had worked together on three of my films: Dew Line in 2005, Relative Orbits (documentary) in 2004 and Utopia Parkway in 1997. Jamie is a true Renaissance man: composer, sound designer, animator and editor. It took him a 11 months to compose the music and complete the sound design for North of Blue, using Ableton Live and Pro Tools. I loved everything he composed and fragments of his music would become ear worms that played in my head for days. That's always a good sign. We collaborated during the mix, but I had only minor input, occasionally asking Jamie if we could simplify an area to match the starkness of a scene. I like dubstep and I begged him to add major bass drops, which he wisely limited to two.
North of Blue was a deeply joyful project. Every morning, as I arrived at my studio, I had this delicious, expansive feeling of being in a vast, wild landscape, like the Yukon, with all the time in the world to explore new territory and experiment with unfamiliar imagery. Intriguing challenges in design, composition and content emerged organically and continually and that regenerated my focus and began new strands of inquiry. Four interns worked with me on North of Blue for two months each and I was very much inspired by their energy and creativity and collaborating with digital effects artist Brian Kinkley was thrilling. He generated a new look for the film. The entire process of making North of Blue felt like an extension of being under the spell of the far north.
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