WHAT IS STRATACUT?
Strata cut (or stratacut or strata-cut) is an animation technique that combines stop motion with the slicing of clay (plasticine) blocks. Strata cut defines the language of shapes moving through space and time. Every block of clay contains potential animation that varies by how it’s built.
For example, imagine a rectangular box (also called a orthotope or a hyperrectangle). If you were to slice parallel to an end, there would be NO animation.
If instead you slice diagonally, you create a expanding and contracting box.
The animation comes from change in both perspective and the angle that you slice the clay.
By applying this concept to more complex shapes and ideas you can create more intricate animation like so:
Strata cut converts 3-dimensional physical animation into 2-dimensional physical animation with the ability to see future animation before it happens. In other words, strata cut is “a 3D storytelling metaphor for 4D time/space – Everything is connected to everything else as a string of continuous events and continuous motion. Densely locked spatial blocks show these tubes coming to life over time, something that none of us can otherwise directly really ‘see.’” (Daniels).
HOW TO THINK STRATA
written by David Daniels
The layers you put in, the shapes you lay down – are exactly what will come out of your block, log or loaf. You can predictively control the outcome when you cut it up, and reveal a sliver of ‘time’ progression peeling away 3mm at a time from each block.
Strata is not built up from the camera view bit by bit. It is a sheet of action flowing and bending backward from the camera view over a large arc or extrusion into the depth of each block.
So think these clay sheets and layers and shapes, as time sculpting that you will bend twist fold and mutilate by design. Each geometry action is extending in space into the block – and acts as a metaphor for the 4th dimension of time … which we cannot see, but Strata Cut uniquely describes in an accessible way to TIME BLIND humanity.
The bending and arcing sheets of clay and shapes of texture push through the block as a kind of 3 dimensional time. You are sculpting a 3D metaphor for an invisible fourth dimension that we cannot sculpt, cannot shape, cannot touch as we are truly TIME BLIND – and must use our native 5 sense to communicate. There is no sixth sense to put on a wall or into a film or video. Therefore simply practice thinking shapes over time … or ‘time flow’ in your mind.
PRACTICE THINKING of shapes over time.
Think ten times what the time flow will look like before you sculpt. After such planning, you cut up and photograph your block,
After each result, you spend ten more times to consider how close to your prediction, did the results of your shape over time programming succeed? When it failed, how so? Why is the result predictable, even if you did not predict it. Get better at de biasing your anticipated results, by living the Time Flow repeatedly in your mind.
Confirm or alter your next visualization based on outcomes.
Re think — how the shapes you put in — equals – the animation that comes out. Re consider this ten more times on your next effort. Your mind is in complete control of the outcome. You can be precise or you can be jazzy and free form with your shapes over time, but know the difference and understand what level of randomness is acceptable to the outcome of your shape over time programming.
You do not need to use a lot of clay, to get much better at S/cut.
The mind can pre visualize see inside the mystery box you will create. This is the goal. As a powerful mind, is an enjoyment all to itself, even if you create only a few pieces of art in practice
HOW DAVID DANIELS CREATED STRATA CUT
“I had this thing called Clay Town… I grew up in a family of four and I’m the youngest. We had a Sir Walter Raleigh coffee can left over from ancestors, perhaps grandparents, and it had clay in it. Mom set us up at the kitchen table and we started play-sculpting. I was five years old when we started this and we never put it away. For many hours each day, Clay Town consumed the kitchen table. We did this from the age of five all the way through high school.
Clay absorbs any kind of dirt or lint or punctures or any kind of rough treatment. The plasticine gets very dirty and doesn’t last. So I have all these really neat clay sculptures but cannot show it to anybody because by the time it has been put into a presentation it has gotten dusty and limp and a little funky.
What led to stratacut took place around the age of seven. It was a birthday party and we made a cake out of yellow and blue clay. We cut the cake and I looked at the pieces and thought, ‘Okay, it’s all there. It’s quite beautiful and quite clean and I’m going to do something with that one day'”
I did my first animation at the age of 13 and won an award called Cine Media Five which was put out by Kodak and the Broadway department stores. They brought me to New York and put me in the Plaza Hotel and gave me a thousand bucks — that was the beginning of the addiction! I thought, “Hey! This is the lifestyle I’m going to want to live someday, so I’m going to keep making these movies.”