Surface Dive
Original Article | Overview of Project | Work Samples
Film Still (2001)
By Patricia Thomson
The day Joanna Priestley went snorkeling in an underground river in the Yucatan desert, she knew she’d entered a living fantasy world. "It was like swimming in a bowl of moss," the Portland animator recalls. "It had all these plant roots coming out, and it was filled with brightly colored tropical fish. This happened to me in the early ’70s, and I’ve never forgotten it. They use the term ‘rapture of the deep’ for diving in those places, because people go off into those tunnels and it’s so incredibly beautiful, you forget the time and pretty soon, you run out of air."
That vivid experience inspired Priestley to become a licensed scuba diver. What’s more, it has infiltrated her world of non-narrative animation. The filmmaker’s latest short, Surface Dive, is teaming with iridescent pulsating creatures that seem scooped off the ocean floor. "Surface Dive is about three things," the artist explains about her fifteenth film. "My experience diving, abstraction (color and line, shape and texture) and experimenting with technique." For the first time in her two decades as an animator, Priestley used a multi-plane animation stand, which in fact is glimpsed in one shot of Surface Dive. Developed by German animator, Lotte Reiniger, in the 1920s, this stand allows you to animate several levels at once. "Normally, when you put different layers of artwork under the camera at different levels, it’s all the same kind of artwork. I wanted to use that technique with a variety of different media," she says. For the dominant layer, Priestley sculpted abstract, marine-like creatures that mutate before our eyes through the magic of replacement animation. She spent a year creating these 600 sculptural pieces, each as shiny and brilliant as ceramic, but made from Magi-sculpt, an epoxy-based material developed for special effects in Hollywood films.
Their movements are echoed by a second layer of animation made from 2,200 watercolor paintings. (Not surprisingly, Priestley’s artistic origins were as a printmaker and painter. She trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and University of California at Berkeley and worked in a print atelier in Paris before moving into animation, getting an MFA at California Institute of the Arts, the school founded by Walt Disney.) The ballet of abstract squiggles, hatchings, and geometic shapes recall motifs in Priestley’s earlier animations, as does Surface Dive’s third layer, made of found objects — another Priestley calling card.
"I’ve animated meat, candy, and my first film was all rubber stamps," she notes. Grown Up (1993), her whimsical musing on turning 40, combines drawings with bubble wrap, her own hands, and a surgical scalpel. Her widely distributed Utopia Parkway (1997), named after the Queens street on which artist Joseph Cornell lived, has a magical sequence with animated drawings inside small glass bottles, like some strange and delicate specimens captured inside a jar. "That’s what inspired Surface Dive working with the bottles in Utopia Parkway," Priestley says. "In that film, I was really interested in creating a magical, alchemical feeling — the feeling I get when I look at Cornell’s work. Then when I saw how that looked, I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is so interesting to see animation through pieces of glass.’ That’s when I started collecting all different kinds of glass."
When assembling the shards and clear glass pebbles for Surface Dive, Priestley donned leather gloves and rummaged through a glass company’s dumpster, collecting fragments of industrial and architectural glass. She also contacted stained glass suppliers to get remnants of Craft glass, once abundant in Portland’s homes. She even picked up a broken windshield off the street. "It turned out to be one of my favorites, because of its size and the way it reflected the drawings underneath."
Surface Dive and Priestley’s award-winning films have traveled widely to festivals and museums, and were highlighted in 2000 at a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2001 Surface Dive was included in the Sundance Film Festival’s special program A Celebration of Portland Animation. The artist is currently in the process of assembling these experiments in animation on DVD for international distribution. Looking back, Priestley has no regrets about leaving printmaking for the world of animation. "As a painter and printmaker, when I saw the possibilities of movement, it was like adding dance to sculpture. I could not go back."