Sep 4, 2019

How Did They Do It? Animating Hong Kong's Skyscrapers in Serial Parallels

When Max Hatler moved from London to Hong Kong a few years ago, he noticed a sudden change in his environment. Whereas the British capital was sparse and low-rise, the new city was dense and vertical. The towering buildings made a strong impression on the German experimental filmmaker Max Hatler. His animated works (many of which are featured in Cartoon Brew) often play with the repetition of complex geometric patterns.

"Ever since I moved to Hong Kong," says Hatler, "I've been trying to figure out how to translate my new residence into an appropriate moving image form. The skyscrapers of Hong Kong are reminiscent of film strips, their floors and windows corresponding to frames.

From this concept he developed Serial Parallels, a nine-minute animated film composed of photographs of Hong Kong buildings. Based at City University of Hong Kong, where he teaches in the School of Creative Media, Hatler and his team went out to different districts and took hundreds of photographs. The result is a hypnotic vision of relentless urban architecture set to a suitably mechanical soundtrack.

Cartoon Brew spoke with Hatler about his approach and the ideas behind it:

Hatler: "What I wanted to explore was the visual similarity between filmstrips and skyscrapers. When you run a film through a projector, you create movement. When you treat a building in the same way, strangely enough, it also creates movement within the building. Solid steel and concrete sometimes take on an almost fluid form, supple, shifting, shifting. And as the layers overlap, the presence of the building within the space creates different speeds and directions of movement, all created from a single image, but giving the impression that the city is alive with movement.

"This visual composition is inspired by Michael Wolff's photographic series Architecture of Density, which focuses on the formal abstraction of the repetitive patterns of Hong Kong apartment blocks. Whereas Wolfe's oppressive and awe-inspiring images provide a fixed representation, 'Serial Parallels' is defined by constant flow and transformation."[11

Hatler: "These skyscrapers are located all over Hong Kong, but mainly in Kowloon. We started with the area around City University of Hong Kong and then went further, either without a clear plan or by researching interesting locations on Google Street View to be well prepared."

"I used a Hasselblad H4D-40, Nikon D800, and Canon EOS 5DS R cameras to capture the building facades in high resolution.

Hatler: "The photos were digitally processed to adjust for perspective distortion and zoomed in for animation sequences in Adobe After Effects. It was a very simple technique, but effective in creating a new relationship with the city's architecture.

"The progression of the story was developed considerably in the editing process. The challenge was to keep it interesting by conveying the overwhelming and very repetitive nature of Hong Kong's urban environment while creating a sense of flow where things connect with each other and pull the viewer along. All of the public housing estates are small, precise palettes of architectural typologies. The result is to create connections by replacing one group of buildings with another by changing colors and camera angles, while maintaining the flow of the narrative.

"Serial Parallels" is currently screening at film festivals. The "Receptive Rhythms" exhibition, which features "Serial Parallels" along with two other video works by Hutler, opened this week in Hong Kong.