Magda Kreps – I want to be bored [Animated Documentary]
Upon the recommendation of my tutor, Shaun Clark, I looked at the Factual Animation Film Festival, a festival that showcases some of the best animated documentaries made in the last year. And given I’ve spent a great deal of time looking into this genre, I wanted to look at how other filmmakers approach making a non-fictional story through animation and how they interpret reality.
“Abstract feelings or sensations can be portrayed with visuals and sounds that bring the subject closer to the audience. Or at least show a different perspective.
Today, I’d like to discuss Magda Krep and, specifically, I want to be bored. Krep is a filmmaker who recently graduated from the RCA in this very field of Documentary Animation. Her work focuses on “conveying sensations” that we have all experienced at some point or another. (It’s Nice That). This is evident with the aforementioned documentary, which was born from Krep’s desire to take a break from various distractions and tasks, and record her thoughts, sounds and sensations through audio and document them through animation (RCA).
As part of my research into other filmmakers and their approaches, I sent an email to Krep to understand her thoughts and views on the animated documentary, but also how her decision making process into the films she makes. I guess my curiosity stems from Andy Glynne’s thoughts behind the genre of the animated documentary (as I have mentioned in a previous post), and I’d like to keep looking further into how others treat the genre.
I asked Krep about what it was that appealed to her in regards to animation and documentary, and she wasn’t sure. “[I]t’s just that I’ve been more drawn to non-fictive stories, no matter which medium. With animation, I find the viewer can experience the story in an unusual way. Abstract feelings or sensations can be portrayed with visuals and sounds that bring the subject closer to the audience. Or at least show a different perspective.”
The unity of visual and audio design is most evident in this film. The sounds feel grounded, taken straight from real life. At the start, we hear a bustling city. Throughout, we can hear various clock ticks, constant static noises or sounds that best accompany what’s on screen. It helps us, the spectator, to find a place of common ground. We can recognise and place these sounds from our own experiences, bringing an element of truth.
Because of the sound effects remaining true to life, Krep has been able to play experimentally with the visuals, and how it harmonises with said sound effects. A large part of this film relies on blobs, almost cell-like forms that take the shape of the creatures and objects. The constant floating nature of the drawings almost feels like a true representation of how we hear noise. There isn’t any backgrounds drawn throughout: we purely focus on the objects.
The best example of this is when we hear teaspoons clinking against cups, as if someone were stirring them. You see various cups appear on screen, some closer, some further away, some on the left, some on the right. Whilst visually it seems a bit odd, it almost feels like a loose interpretation of a cafe, people drinking in the midst of a city. Of course, this entirely subjective, and I might be reading further in that maybe Krep intended. But nevertheless, I think it demonstrates nicely the idea of representing what Krep has experienced through sensations that feel familiar.
Working on paper felt more intuitive and it stopped me “checking” all the time if the animation works…
Something that I was curious about was why Krep chose the process that she did, i.e., going for pencil and paper. She responded with: “I’ve set rules that enabled me just to do something, without knowing the result. Working on paper felt more intuitive and it stopped me “checking” all the time if the animation “works” if you know what I mean.”
Again, I can’t help but feel a sense of realness despite the rather loose recreation of the drawings. I think, like Stephen Prince mentioned in one of my previous posts, it’s texture. You see the paper, the crinkles and grain of the material constantly boiling and changing. It almost feels like an artist painting on a canvas in real life and seeing the images move. The line art is rough, you can see the graphite that makes up the drawing, and the occasional random line stroke that almost feels like film grain. The drawings are unrefined, almost careless, but alive and free.
Krep’s film caught my attention because it caught a strange but fun balance between reality and exaggeration. It takes elements of our experiences and recreates them loosely (in every sense of the word). Sound informs everything, the visuals accompanying whatever we hear. In this day and age where the spectator may be concerned with polish, art styles, realism and colour, it’s nice to see a film which challenges these notions and isn’t afraid to be raw in its presentation.
It’s Nice That – https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/magda-kreps-animation-140921