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got the idea that since I'm outlining the reality anyway, I could do the same thing with a projected image. When I got back to the States, I dug up this footage of gulls I'd shot from the back of a ferry boat, and the footage of swans. It was all good stuff I had shot when I was trying to make a film after I did the NBC thing for Brinkley. I'd gotten a lot of 7252 stock, but I was so ignorant that I couldn't get the lighting right and the stuff looked flat. Of course 7252 stock does look flat in the original. It's only a printing stock. But I was very slow coming to this, and I was so disappointed in the live action material that I abandoned the whole project. Anyhow, I decided I'd use that footage, but that I could draw those gulls better than I'd photographed them. For the rotoscoping I just remade my old Craig viewer. I took the top off it and enlarged the screen to four by six, bought index cards that would fit, and started tracing and cranking through the images one at a time. It was very crude. I couldn't see the gulls sharply at all and realized that it would be silly to pursue it in too much detail. I decided to be sketchy about it and assume that the general movement would show. I could enjoy myself with drawing for a change and not have to worry about the relationships from one image to the next.
Three or four years ago I rotoscoped David Bowie.
MacDonald:
How did that happen?
Breer:
Pennebaker asked me to do it for that film he made with Bowie in his last incarnation as Ziggy [
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,
1983]. I did some sample sequences that were sent to Bowie, who liked them, though as things turned out that material was never used. But at one point Bowie decided he wanted to learn animation and wanted me to teach him. Pennebaker sent him a tape of my films and Bowie's ten-year-old son ended up using
Fuji
to teach himself how to animate.
MacDonald: Fuji
seems the most conventional narrative you've done. We experience a particular, chronological train ride. Did you shoot the original footage of that trip with this film in mind?
Breer:
No. I had a neat little fifty-dollar Super-8 Kodak camera, which I still use. The handle folds up, and you can slip it in your pocket. A no-focus, idiot camera. I shot the footage out the window of the Tokaido Express, a 135-mile-an-hour train. You can't go to an exotic place like Japan and not record your trip to show the folks, so that's what it was, just a mindless bunch of footage out the window, without the possibility of refined focus and with no thought of the future. I didn't dig that film up until three years later when I was fishing around for an excuse to do some more rotoscoping. What attracted me to the footage was the mountain in the background and the possibility for motion perspective in the foreground. The film plays with deep space and the flat picture plane of the screen.