Two new animated Web shorts give dark realization to author Toby Barlow's horror epic poem/novel SHARP TEETH, creator Radium announced Friday.
The work by designer/directors Brady Baltezore and Limbert Fabian of Radium, San Francisco/Dallas/Los Angeles can be seen at the book's website,
www.sharpteeththebook.com .
Barlow is Executive Creative Director at ad agency JWT, NY.
"I was lucky enough to work with Radium on the Billy Collins Action Poetry project and was incredibly impressed by their work," Barlow said. "Not only did they bring the dark, scary parts of the book to life, they also managed to find the humor in the book too."
Fabian said, "The visual language we wanted to explore for this piece was to be in a constant dream state, where you can float from image to image, moment to moment with images constantly transforming. Black and white as a limited color pallet was a great backdrop for the powerful blood red we splattered throughout. Our aim was to capture that feeling of wondering: was that real or a dream?"
To achieve the first short, Baltezore created hand-built miniature sets and characters using scraps of paper, wood, cardboard and metal to create a mixture of stop motion and 3D animation.
Baltezore's animated interpretation opens on a glimmering Los Angeles skyline, then pushes down onto a darkened house constructed of sheet music.
A deep, foreboding voiceover begins, "Peabody the cop wakes up because his 3-year-old is vomiting." The voiceover continues, "It's nothing serious. There was a birthday party earlier: cake, ice cream, soda."
A paper airplane navigates a group of mutant cupcakes and we're quickly taken back outside where the music-sheeted home falls apart and reconstructs in a whimsical flash.
Limbert Fabian's "Chapter VII" animated film opens on the Roman numeral, VII, accompanied by the same voiceover, "Gently he took her by the wrist and paused for a moment until a glint of confidence returned to her eyes."
A limp, silhouetted hand appears and stiffens as the voiceover continues, "Then, he cut into the small piece of fat beneath her thumb and pressed his bleeding palm against hers."
From the bloody gash in her hand, we follow two intertwining ribbons of blood through bandages and into puddles on a tile floor.
The voiceover gives a physiological description of the woman losing consciousness, we see capillaries, and muscle fibers burst and explode.
She wakes on the floor, watching a wolf-dog lap up her spilt blood; this is an out of body experience as the wolf-dog is now her.
In her transformed K9 body, she howls out over the Los Angeles skyline.
