You surely know it too: you arrive to a new city, to a new country and they chew you up like tobacco. Many new impressions fill your head and you have to think something about it all. Peter Luha and Lucia Černeková provide us with an insight into their perception through short experimental films from their series On the road.
Experimental animated film does not have a strong tradition in Slovakia. In the socialist era there were neither conditions, nor authors with ambitions to do it. Today, in the era of new media and new ideologies, experiment is a natural part of Slovak animated film and is most often connected with the Academy of Fine Arts.
Lucia Černeková of the Lightstone seekers creative duo also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. “The animations expressively reflect our true feelings about life as authors, because we travel the world trying to find the secret of life. That is where we got our name as a team from – Lightstone Seekers (Lucia = light, Peter = stone) “, says musician and second team member Peter Luha.
There are three completed films from On the road series so far: Spain (2011), Der Turm (2012) and the latest film Brussels(2013). Presently, the “seekers” are working on two other films. “The working procedure leading to the creation of animations from a particular place is usually as follows: First, we get to know the country, the people, we collect different materials, discuss about our ideas, impressions, look for possible topics, interesting ideas, we strive to capture our feelings. Then we start to work on individual scenes. We use mainly traditional hand-drawn animation – drawing on paper, painting, photographic stop-motion and the final image is then retouched on computer. We are looking for sounds, creating the music. Animations are mainly about the visual and audio expression of our feelings, poetic and slightly surreal”, Peter Luha explains.
The creative duo has visited several countries: “We went on six artistic residences with our project so far. We were in Spain, Germany, France, and Belgium and recently in Finland where we were working on our new film Finlandia, which will be finished in autumn. We spent 6 months there and have just returned a few days ago”.
The upcoming movies about France and Finland will enter festivals in some time. The completed films have already been presented at several international festivals and the latest film about Brussels will spend the summer at the Hayah International Festival of Short Films in Panama (July 1 – 8, 2013) and at the International Festival de Cine de Pasto in Colombia (August 26 – 31, 2013), as it made it to the official festival selection.
You can watch the movies from the On the road project online at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/lucypaint
For more information click on:
https://www.facebook.com/ontheroad.animations
http://lucypaint.com
http://peterluha.com
http://vimeo.com/lightstoneseekers
Eva Perďochová
