Doorknob (in-Production 2024)
Doorknob tells the story of a raucous teenage barrel maker, Hosey Lee Beck, who has found herself working in East Liverpool, Ohio in 1849- a decade before the American Civil War. For work, Hosey cuts down saplings, soaks them in brine vats, and uses them to craft barrels for pottery (specifically ceramic doorknobs) being shipped up and down the Ohio River. Hosey receives word that her mother is quickly dying from cholera and cannot afford to get home to the foothills of South Eastern Ohio and so she devises a plan to ship herself downriver in one of her barrels.
To craft this story, I am drawing on visual storytelling conventions from illuminated manuscripts. The drawings are peculiar. Medieval painters had not yet learned perspective, so architecture, landscapes, animals and humans are uncanny. They combine highly skilled technique with a simple, reproducible 2-dimentioniality. The artists flatten out images and translate perspective and scale in a deceivingly simplistic way. While medieval masters like DaVinci paved the way for pre-Renaissance painting, the style of illuminated manuscripts doubled down in an almost comical Avant-garde style.
I am also interested in the function of illuminated manuscripts. They are the most expensive and ornate type of decorated manuscript. I’ve found there to be little evidence of practical uses of these elaborate, time consuming, expensive manuscripts. They function as spectacle reserved for the wealthy and elite. Decoration in medieval manuscripts was used to enhance the overall value of the book and really functions as a statement of the importance of the person or institution that had commissioned or owned the book.
As a contemporary animator and filmmaker, I connect to the scribes who locked themselves in their “scriptoriums”, drawing Biblical scenes almost their entire lives. The detail, the sheer quantity of the imagery, the dissection and interpretation of the text- this is akin to what I do in my dark basement studio repeating images frame after frame to create movement, to create image, to tell story. For the monks who created these books, the work is a celebration of sacred texts. These painstaking studies in divine spirituality are a part of a larger spiritual practice where process is as elaborate and “holy” as the finished piece. Animating an illuminated manuscript is a modernization of an old tradition and the next step in this long lineage. Present-tense storytelling, pushing into moving image.
