Mar 11, 2023

Still Life, a fascinating experiment in replacement animation by Conor Griffiths

L.A.-based experimental animator Conor Griffith's latest short film, "Still Life," is now available.

"Still Life" evokes a sense of nostalgia, like turning the pages of an old catalog found in the basement of your grandparents' house.

For "Still Life," Griffith scanned and processed over 1,400 prints from various historical sources. The images flow from one to the next with such aesthetic fidelity that one would think they were created for this short film, but they are not.

Instead, Griffiths collected images from engravings produced in the 19th century for visual dictionaries, shopping catalogs, instruction manuals, and scientific documents. The printmaking techniques used to produce the images varied, but most were woodcut or metal plate.

"In these archives, the artists themselves are often not directly credited," Griffiths explains. 'You are left with an encyclopedia of objective representation, an illustrated encyclopedia of facts without any subjective ownership.' For me, this was the language of things begging to be written.

In addition to putting his films online, Griffith is sharing his entire library of scanned and separated prints for free in the hopes that the public domain archive can be used for a variety of creative approaches. A Google Drive link to the archive is here.

Griffith is a 2016 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and has devoted much of his practice to alternative animation since graduation. According to Griffith, his goal is to "push the boundaries of what I have seen in this technique," and his latest work, Still Life, is perhaps the exploration I am most proud of. [Still Life] examines how replacement animation can be more than a visual effect."