directed/shot/edited by: Derrick Belcham
props/animation/shadow cuts by: Ruby Kato Attwood and Jessie Stein
produced by: Schtuff
funded in part by generous funding from: FACTOR
Schtuff is the collective name for the artistic collaborations of Derrick Belcham, Ruby Kato Attwood and Jessie Stein.
Their most recent project is a music video for Stein’s band The Luyas. It is made entirely of hand-made paper animation machines, crystals and analog light and shadow. Most every object in the video is spinning on a record player. The song, “Moodslayer” was written by compiling the anxieties and venerations of a close friend as they dealt with their first schizophrenic hallucinations.
Shot on a modified digital camcorder, the visuals were created by fashioning unique apertures from cardboard and other coarse papers, modifying a variety of light sources with an assortment of glass geometry and directing the changes through a live video monitor.
The depiction centres on the dichotomy between the protagonist’s experience of the real and unreal within their psychological construct. They are thrown into a spectacular display of thought forms, settling on archetypes of peace from their youth, but, eventually, they are serenaded back into the unreal where a kind of comfort and control can be maintained.