About Last Night

Yesterday afternoon I was telling Christina she should read Signe Baumane's blog, and she countered with a story of how Signe introduced her to PES at Patrick Smith's Christmas party when she was interning at Blend Films.

Signe pulled her over, gushing about what a great job she working on Bill Plympton's "Hair High" and graciously made the introduction.

Anyhow, the point is that Signe is amongst the friendliest, hardest working and (seriously) smartest people in animation.  She gave a presentation of several of her films at The Society of Illustrators last night.

She frames her presentation, like many of her films, with dispassionate talk about sex.

She says: "They say 'sex sells'.  It's not true, sex doesn't sell.  What sells is porn and I don't do porn."

Other pieces of wisdom:

"That's a problem.  I studied philosophy so I can justify whatever shit I make."

On virginity (probably applicable to her films): "You do it fast, or you don't do it at all."

On autobiographic "truth" in her films: "What is the truth?  What is reality? I'm interested in the story."

The screenings concluded with a brief (two or three minutes) excerpt from her current feature length film in production.  She's partially funded it by papier mache sculptures, partially with grants from NYSCA and the Jerome Foundation and is currently creeping towards her goal.

The excerpt demonstrated an integration of papier mache models with draw characters -a little reminiscent of "When the Wind Blows" visually.  There wasn't enough context or development within the sequence to make any statements on narrative.