Escar-Gogh

Written, directed, and animated by Hunter Silvestri

Voiced by Patty Mattson

"Sanctus" by The Tudor Consort

Artist's Statement

Escar-Gogh, like any great artwork, was born as a piece of purple prose written satirically at four in the morning at the International House of Pancakes in Providence, Rhode Island. I forgot about it as soon as I was done.

Months later, I took my first animation class—an unfocused half-credit course—and started thinking about what stories I could tell using my rudimentary drawing skills and the computers at my disposal. I thought a lot about movement, but rather than focusing on walk cycles and character action which were well beyond my abilities, I looked instead to motion through time.

That’s when my old and weird piece of prose (then titled, I kid you not, “The Snail in the Skull and in the Oldest Nook”) came back to me. It’s a piece obsessed with huge timescales. It features sets ranging in size from 2 centimeters to 91 billion light-years, and it stars an invisible cynical God, a shelled gastropod, and a birdsong. In essence, the story was nothing I could make using traditional film and frankly nothing like I’d seen in traditional animation. It demanded a level of abstraction which was a perfect match for my technical inability to draw anything more complicated than a robust squiggly line.

So when the next semester came around and I had the time, I made it. I had no budget, barely any training with the programs I was using, and no sense of how very much I was biting off, but I did it and it’s pretty and I’m proud. Escar-Gogh is much more than I ever anticipated: an experiment in both storytelling and in art, a love letter to short-lived things, a rejection of nihilism and pretention, and a contradiction to all those points. This movie will ask you to take it very seriously. I invite you to tell it “no.” Life’s short.

—hcjs, 2018