White Out

Notes on the film

This energetic ode to wintertime activities uses rotoscope animation to connect movement across disparate paper surfaces, from bright construction paper to recycled notebook pages and scrap receipts. The film’s colour palette, linework style, and paper backgrounds change with almost every frame, creating an energetic pulsating composition that the artist described as “rock and roll for the eyes.” Yet the viewer’s eye stays grounded in the fluid realism of rotoscoped movement that carries gestural continuity across successive frames. The figures are often painted and drawn loosely, sometimes capturing only the active silhouette or pose. Animated in rapid succession, these figures come alive as they soar across a mountain slope or lob a snowball.

Paper plays a key role in this film, with unpainted areas of the canvas used to evoke snow banks and ski slopes. Blank sheets are combined with calendar pages, product manuals, book pages, ticket stubs, and carton boxes suggestive of a personal collection of waste paper or ephemera. These familiar surfaces are instantly recognizable as they flicker by on screen. They lend the film a sense of diaristic impressions and quotidian snapshots.

Graphic continuity of rotoscoped footage anchors frame-by-frame variation in linework and colour.

Although the film includes a variety of drawing and painting media, watercolour is particularly noteworthy for the atmospheric washes and bleeds that enhance the wintery landscape. Streaks of dryer pigment flesh out the moving bodies, while fluid washes are used to render snowflakes and ice patches. The combination of rotoscoped footage, paper ephemera, and loose gestural painting style create the impression of an animated home video that returns the viewer to childhood play and wonder.