Curious About the Process
a conversation with Doug Vitarelli
I learned of Matthias, a modern day Norman McLaren living in Brooklyn, because, not surprisingly, an experimental animator’s account from Brooklyn found its way into my Instagram feed. He regularly posts work that is both handmade and digital and can be appreciated not only for aesthetics but purpose, inventiveness, craft, and poetry.
Can you just give me a quick background? Where did the interest come from?
I would say I’ve always enjoyed watching animation and cartoons, but my first foray into experimenting or using animation in any form was probably a one-week long summer course that was at a school that my mom was connected to as an art teacher.
And how old were you when you went to this camp?
It was fifth grade, maybe. A lot of learning how to do very basic animation. And I don’t know if it was a practice at the time to be as destructive with the editing process, but there was a lot of copy and paste and layers for Photoshop and Macromedia Flash.
I did flash animation through high school but maybe more graphic design because I came to the understanding that being an animator was being a small part of a very large team, and that wasn’t the most appealing to me creatively.
And so I continued on the graphic design route, went to SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) in Atlanta and got a BFA. And while I was there, I started using Tumblr. At that time animated GIFs were gaining in popularity and they had a little bit more freedom artistically and because there was enough bandwidth you could push that a little bit further than just a tiny thing, or a flashing sort of animation.
And I started doing a lot of glitch work, like taking video and data and mashing it when you use a compression format. That was interesting. And then I started doing some rotoscoping (didn’t know what it was called) and that’s where the name TraceLoops comes from, because I was tracing and making looping animations.
Oh, I love it.
And I didn’t want it tied to a format so I rotoscoped black and white things for two reasons. One was fewer materials. And two, if you’re working in a digital space, it’s understood you have to deal with color correction on screens or the variation between colors. So on different screens when it’s just black or it’s white or a grayscale there’s no correction needed so you don’t have to focus on a screen that might lean more yellow, more blue or whatever.
And then file size. Using animated GIFs and limiting your color palette is very helpful in being able to use dithering to fill in the textures as opposed to individual colors and it limits the file size, because file size was a necessary thing for that platform.
And so while I was in school I started doing that and got a little bit of brand work on the tail end.
And this thing was something that could be animated as a single individual, making something that I felt like I had both the creative and the work control that I had the creative direction, but I also got to work on the things physically. And just have sort of continued with that.
I’ll also say that during my senior year, I took a history of film class and that’s where I first saw work by Norman McLaren. And that was a real good fit for me.
That’s a good point. I totally see you as McLaren-like.
So are you from this area?
I’m from North Carolina originally, but grew up around the south.
I’m just curious why you moved to New York.
I graduated from college, and my dad is a pastor at a church in Jersey City and the church has housing they provide for the pastor, a four bedroom house. And so I was living there for a while until I moved in with my now wife a few years ago to Sunset Park.
I checked out your website, Patreon, Instagram and TikTok accounts, store and a YouTube channel. You have to have like a thousand videos.
I was doing live streaming for a bit while. It was just a daily task and worked well for personal work incrementally, with small goals along the way. Also did some Instagram live streams at some point. I found that it’s a good way to stay on task. Some have fallen off, but I’ll start back up at some point. It’s a good way to keep accountability for yourself.
And also when streaming, it’s much harder to like, diverge and go work on something else or go not work on something else.
Yeah, I understand. There’s always laundry that can be done. How did you make the jump from school to being this? Can you tell me about that journey?
While I was still in school I was making more short animated GIFs and submitted some to (I forgot the exact name) Art Week Miami. It was curated and I think (not 100% sure) that one of the people on the selection panel was Michael Stipe from R.E.M.
I think he might have been the judge that selected the one I just had pixelated, a joke GIF that was a transition/dissolve of Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. His face was filling the frame and then a pan down, and he was tiny, and it said Thurston Less.
So that was co-hosted by Tumblr and then the Brooklyn Academy of Music wanted to have a selection playing for their outdoors billboard, maybe around 2013, but in order to show it at a different location they had to get permission from me. So someone reached out from Tumblr and I said, “I’ll be in the city during break and it would be nice to meet you” and asked if it was okay to put me forward for band work. So that got me some connections to the first brand work that I did, a few animated GIFs, for Converse’s Music Tumblr.
I put all the frames on the side of the sneaker, and then photographed it so that you see the sneaker rotating and the little animation of the guy. And I did a few other ones that were just sneakers dancing.
Then I just continued working on my own through different channels and distributed.
You’re really DIY, very tactile. I like the drill press that you have. And I just saw recently on your Instagram that you’re using a Cricut?
Yeah, I have a Cricut and I’ll use that for things that are tedious or really impractical to do by hand. I’ve been using it for geometric animations where the change between frames and the precision of it all sucks to cut out by hand. Even if I were cutting out by hand, it would look bad because the changes need to be consistent and precise. For any machine or process, I like there to be a reason I’m doing it that way, so the Cricut is real nice for grids and circles, triangles and squares, waves and lots of small pieces to cut.
You’re working with shadow, you made a zoetrope and some embroidery. Where do the ideas come from?
I am really interested in how things work, and how something functions, and I’ll see that a thing has an interesting element or I’ll have done some work with the material in the past, and I just want to have a better understanding of how it works. I’m trying to think of the cutouts I had done, some cutout things that were focused on shadow a while ago, that it was just like some dancing figures from folded paper. And I like seeing how something works and trying to use something in a way that can’t be done otherwise. Which sort of goes back to some of Norman McLaren’s things, like there’s just a simple idea or a facet of something that really can’t be done otherwise.
I got the Cricut at some point, and that was a big catalyst for doing more cutout animation. It’s really just curiosity about a function and maybe getting a tool and pushing it further, trying to explore what makes that process distinct.
And with the paper, initially I wanted to have a structural item, like taking a three dimensional form and cutting it into a bunch of slices, kinda like 3D printing, but stacks of cut paper. But when I first cut out pieces of paper, it wasn’t enough slices to create a 3D form. However, when I lowered my light source and cast a harsher shadow, there was a feeling of depth in the photos captured. That light, having the strong shadows, really gave it a sense of physicality and scale.
Part of that comes from a graphic design background where it’s a fine balance of information and extraneous information and simplifying something to where your understanding of it is as instant as possible, but not excessive. And I’m curious about that as a thing.
Do you have a favorite piece, one that makes you say, “Damn, that looks great”?
I really like the music video that I did for Fiona Apple because it was a culmination of things and a larger task to take on because it’s a 3.5 minute video. And my weird 15 frames per second, which is an awkward thing for software, that comes from rotoscoping digital footage means that my sense of motion is different than a lot of the animators that I know.
A lot of the times, it’s whatever is the more recent sort of thing because that’s where the focus is. I do find that there are things that I made in the past that I was really excited about in the moment and now see what I would consider the shortcomings of it.
And there are things that I didn’t like that I do like now because they was a more unique approach to it. And maybe I didn’t like the outcome, but I like the ide and so I can revisit that. It’s harder to revisit something that I liked in the moment, because it was maybe something more resolved.
So how much commission work do you get?
It ebbs and flows.
Sometimes it’ll be several things or a larger project for a month. I’ve learned not to expect to have a project, but to pace out work.
Has it always been natural for you to post on social media?
It’s something that I more or less grew up with, I was sort of on the cusp of it. I wasn’t big on watching YouTubers do that sort of thing but went to a lot of Macromedia Flash sites, things that had these 1 or 2 small teams that developed games and animation, stuff like that.
MySpace was my first foray into that and then at college I was focused on Tumblr, which I still use today and enjoy it. And then Instagram, when they started focusing more on video.
It’s what you’re comfortable with. There are people who are much more aware or build up more personality, which isn’t bad, but it’s not for me to be like that all the time.
How do you post regularly? How much time is put into the creative part and how much the social part in an 8-hour day?
It’s figuring out a way that works. There’s a Bill Gates quote “If you have a tough project, you give it to the laziest person because they’ll figure out the easiest way to do it”. And I enjoy finding efficiency in whatever sort of thing.
Some things take more time. When I’m on a project I won’t post on that because it’s the thing that gives me money. So then I’m posting the other things.
I liked one of your pieces where you use a Pixel Press.
Yes, Pixel Press. It started out slow and then once I got into repetitive movement it went really fast. And the results on that are wonderful. Thank you.
For that editing style, part of it is understanding how video games teach you how to interact with something. It’s slow, easy, and then repetitious. And as time goes on, you just have it as almost like a muscle memory.
So all your stuff is short and experimental and obviously you’re doing something right. Well, obviously you’re doing a bunch of things right. But any thoughts on doing larger format pieces or things more complicated?
I’ve done up to a couple minutes but it’s not narrative. I don’t know that I have a strong skill set for character animation or something like that. I’ve done some things that are longer form, but usually it’s work around, a cheat or something where it’s modular and it builds out in time.
I do have some personal things that are longer form, but they’re loops that build into each other or build larger and so it keeps your interest. But it’s really maybe 30 seconds of animation that’s made into like five minutes of animation or whatever sort of works.
I can really see your work at BAM, like in the background of a Philip Glass and Robert Wilson opera, Or something like live visuals for concerts. You have…?
I did some work for Beck earlier this year.
You did?
Totally, it was through an artist in Scotland, Jimmy Turrell, who does a lot of printmaking stuff. He’s done work with Beck in the past and for the tour they were looking for some things and he reached out. It was a mixture of licensing, some existing work and doing some things to sort of fill in gaps.
Do you know any other artists like you who you go have coffee with in a record store in Brooklyn?
There are some folks but some have moved since COVID. It’s people that I would go to see when Tumblr was more active in having events and we would meet through those spaces. It’s people who are focused on animation similar to mine or people who are just curious about the process.
I have a friend, Zolloc, that’s his handle. Did a lot of Cinema 4D. My friend Sam Cannon, who has a photo background. Those are people that I met through Tumblrs and then continued keeping up with them. And in Jersey City, there’s a studio complex/art storage space called Mana Contemporary. They were figuring out a little bit of their residency program with some traditional stuff and we were able to be tacked on because we work largely in digital spaces and so they didn’t have to commit as much physical space to us as a group.
It was Hayden, Sam. Thoka Maer, she does Google Doodle stuff, and is closest to me in style because she would do hands on animation, but it wasn’t as experimental. Then Julian Glander, who recently released a feature-length film that he pretty much just been by himself called Boys Go to Jupiter.
Is that the guy in Pennsylvania?
I think he’s in Pittsburgh now. He was in Sunset Park for a minute before I moved here.
He’s somebody who does more experimental but jokey sorts of things with a more comedic friendly sort of look.
And it’s a lot of talk about whatever is affecting whatever we’re working on. It’s changed over time, now we’re focused on the platform.
Is it difficult to make a living?
Yeah. A lot of those people that I know do a mixture of things. A lot more brand work, for instance pop-up events that wanted to have something interesting, lighting or an installation sort of thing. Like Dave and Gabe. They have a space out in Bushwick and were doing a lot of installation-based spaces or making a large LED screen that are site specific. That sort of deal. But with the lockdown a lot of that work was gone and they started developing a game show that’s a live gaming experience that incorporates elements of a build out and having an interactive thing. But it makes sense.
Also, with sales using social media things, you just sort of gotta always be promoting it.
I was going to add as far as process techniques and that sort of stuff, at art school I was often the most mathematical person in the art space or the most artsy person in the math space.
Well, thank you very much.
Oh yeah, definitely, definitely appreciate it.