You’ve got to hand it to creatives who go through brutual tediousness to make something beautiful for the world to enjoy. This is exactly what engineer and stop-motion animator Brett Foxwell has done for his new short film WoodSwimmer.
This stop-motion video was created from countless shots of wood being sanded down, creating beautiful, otherworldly shapes and patterns.
The film documents the process of raw wood slowly being sanded away, with countless cross-section shots that pieced together to reveal every knot, crevice and stunning imperfection of the wood.
The style of stop-motion imparts a liquid-like fluidity to the wood, creating swirling shapes and patterns and it is slowly worn down.
Chatting with This Is Colossal, Foxwell talks about his process:
“Fascinated with the shapes and textures found in both newly-cut and long-dead pieces of wood, I envisioned a world composed entirely of these forms. As I began to engage with the material, I conceived a method using a milling machine and an animation camera setup to scan through a wood sample photographically and capture its entire structure.
Although a difficult and tedious technique to refine, it yielded gorgeous imagery at once abstract and very real. Between the twisting growth rings, swirling rays, knot holes, termites and rot, I found there is a lot going on inside of wood.”
Check it out WoodSwimmer here:
[via Colossal]
