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Slice by slice – You cut the clay. Then what’s inside will ANIMATE

October 3rd-6th! Details HERE.

  

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FEATURED WORK
BUZZ BOX (REMIX) 2006

The OG Buzz Box from 1985 was a complete re-imagination of clay animation using STRATA CUTS: Programmable distortion layers of geometry and shape that remain hidden and passive inside each block (or loaf) until the sculpt is knifed away, 3 or 4 millimeters at a time. 

The potential energy locked within, explodes with kinetic energy on playback. This yields a seductive morph-hypnosis or lucid ‘plasma field’ effect – where ALL pixels move across every animation frame. 

Six minutes have been cut from the original 15 in this High Definition re-transfer from the original film master running at 36 fps (not 24.) Timely micro-edits were added like GW Bush lying about WMD’s, and a sideways cameo by Osama Bin Laden

The Re-Mix is one third less of an audience endurance challenge than the original, which throws a full throttle psycho-morphic assault of consumer trivialities and sensationalist horror into the eyeballs of the viewer. 

The Box delivers junk food thinking into the passive mouth, eyes and brain of every-man consumers who shape-shift throughout. These characters appear as a series of changing stupor like faces that sit passive before the Buzz: A chaos tsunami that spews out clutter and density that ends in a shattering attack on its clay animated victim with real forks and knives.

Using Strata Cuts, Daniels delivers a fresh fun house mirror reflection on the choppy and incoherent nature of real world media overload. His images beguile, assault and massage before attacking and overwhelming us with a firehose of relentlessly useless information: This accelerates into a real time brain wash of ‘rinse and repeat’ – of ‘seduction and abuse’ – which builds to a ‘War Gazzmic’ ending climax. 

Buzz Box’s dialectic themes are attraction vs. repulsion – innocence vs. corruption – sex vs. death – giddiness vs. horror – hypnosis vs. epilepsy – content vs. overload. These contrasting ideas resonate, loop, bounce around and accelerate. It’s a visceral attempt to force audience reflection on the corrupt power of information age society designed to make us all remain passive about the banality of evil, due the full weaponization of modern dis-info-tain-ment.

The ‘days of the week’ narrative asks you to absorb both linear acceleration and cyclical repetition. The climax short-circuits into a sparking emotional flameout that never really ends as we relive hyper cuts of that weeks daily trash:  A beautiful week of Strata Cut that get’s condensed and recycled each weekend. 

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DAVID DANIELS / INSANIMATOR

  • At 8 years old, he discovered the idea of cutting clay to reveal the beautiful interior designs hidden within. After winning awards for his first stop-motion clay animation short in 1972, he pursued a career in media and filmmaking.
  • He went to the California Institute of the Arts for his Master’s in Fine Arts degree in experimental animation. His thesis was the 1985 short film Buzz Box.  A 15-minute Strata Cut funhouse mirror – reflecting the mental and visceral effects of sensory overload and dis-information chaos.  This film is now being remastered in 4K and archived at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. 
  • After his work on Pee Wee’s Playhouse, MTV, and Movie Titles such as ‘Freaked’ – He spent 8 years as a director at Vinton Studios in Portland and was foundational to their early Computer Graphics, including the design and direction of the first contemporary M & M’s characters.
  • In 2001 he cofounded Bent Image Lab where he worked as a director and promoter of other creative talents and technologies within the company. In 2012, After receiving honors from Anima Mundi and Chilimonos Animation festivals, Daniels began to create a series of stereo HOW TO videos showing the creation and building of detailed and difficult kinds of Strata Cuts.
  • In 2014, he helped Bent expand into spatial computing software in 2014, via the YOUar project – (youar.io) – a way for Augmented Reality computer vision to be convergently shared person to person or in groups – across all devices which are otherwise incompatible.
  • In 2022, he began making new StrataCut artwork, with a successful one-man gallery retrospective and new work Los Angeles show this summer. Daniels also performed a series of Livestream ‘demos’ and tutorials on Instagram. He explains how StrataCut works, while creating blocks in front of a live audience who also help create the textures that are used in his ‘shape over time’ programming. At the conclusion, these demo blocks are cut up and the audience gets to experience the visually explosive result of what was created in front of them. (@strata_cut on insta)
  • He is currently developing physical/digital StrataCut NFT’s. He wants to take a ‘grid camera’ approach to shooting any stop motion in the future. It is a way to capture the real dimensionality of the experience for use and reprocessing with artificial intelligence – so VR headsets and AR glasses can see playback of the StrataCut event from a fluid range of multiple viewpoints – depending on the ego motion of the viewer.