Big, chunky pixels: New lo-fi animation
Wyld File
Wyld File uses Flash® to make pixilated music videos that are one part arcade game and one part free-form exuberance. The group was formed in 2004 by two artists who wanted a separate moniker under which they could make music videos for artists such as Beck, The Gossip, and Islands. Massachusetts-based Ben Jones is an artist, musician, and a member of the three-person art collective Paper Rad. Portland, Oregon based E*Rock is a musician, artist, and the proprietor of Audio Dregs records. Both have been making animations online since the late ’90s, gaining individual notoriety for their psychedelic imagery and adventurous use of Flash. As E*Rock sees it, the strength of his and Jones’ collaboration, which began with the Beck videos, is based on their overlapping interests. “Certain themes were just very present. We're both really into specific parts of pop culture and fine art: psychedelic animation, pixel animation, early video game styles, specific types of music...tons of crossovers. We don't have much interest in being a purely commercial venture, so we only take projects that seem appropriate, but it’s still nice to have that challenge of making music videos for people.”
Figure 2: “Gameboy Homeboy” is Wyld File’s animated music video for Beck. This series of videos was made for the Gameboy style 8-bit remixes made from songs from his latest album “Guero.”
The result of their collaboration is videos like “Gameboy Homeboy” (a B-Side from Beck’s 2005 album Guero), a raucous trip through the Wyld urban landscape: flat, iconic video-game-like characters that move with the hilarious stiffness of paper dolls, a resolutely 2-D perspective, and pulsing neon colors, all created in Flash, a program originally intended for online use, and certainly not for the broadcast. Both partners began using Flash in the late ’90s because of its simplicity and versatility. The fact that both artists have roots in zine culture predisposed them to the DIY qualities of Flash. An artist can quickly render and animate a vector graphic, closing the gap between concept and execution. And on various practical levels, Flash makes it easy to sync sound to images, it’s easy to quickly layer different graphic elements, and the files are light enough to email back and forth. Jones and E*Rock frequently email chunks of videos to each other as they work on the same project from different locations.
Figure 3: “Bad Cartridge” is Wyld File’s second animated music video made for Beck's Gameboy remix series.
On a conceptual level, Ben Jones likes to push the limits of a program and make it do something it’s not supposed to do. “That makes it lo-tech, because lo-tech equals limitations. If you use a program to show its limitations, you’re exposing the interior of the program—the way it works.” Jones and E*Rock are controlling what the technology makes, instead of the technology controlling what they make. One thing they don’t make is concessions towards ideas of progress or any rules of the medium. “I think you probably have to follow certain stylistic rules with regular animation,” says E*Rock, “but we can take the best parts of pixel and vector animation and cross over whenever it feels right.” The result of this freedom is a visual dissonance that allows the viewer his or her own creative connections. “Let me put it this way,” says Jones, “the primitive motion of Mario jumping into a tube resonates with me far more than seeing Ren or Stimpy’s exaggerated squint.” The visual evidence of technological limitations can itself be inspiring. The simple proof of technological power, however, is not. “I suppose there's a certain amount of disbelief that goes along with watching our videos,” E*Rock says, “because we don't make things that are realistic or use 3D modeling or any of that.” The highly modeled realism of Pixar leaves nothing to guess work, and as such deprives viewers of a particularly pleasurable kind of mystery that so often adheres to the best art.
