Bringing Imagery to Life

The Operators collaborated with photographer Jillian Lochner on her latest series of beautiful images entitled Shoes Knickers & Snails.

We worked closely with Jillian creating an overall aesthetic and style to the series as well as evolving her work into a fully animated IMAGEmotion piece.  

View Print Commission

View Motion Commission

When offered the opportunity to animate one of her images from the series The Operators decided to reference some very early animation techniques and styles form the beginning of the 20th century.

Jillian’s image handels the interaction of snails and therefore Ladislas Starevich’s 1911 film The Cameraman’s Revenge seemed to come to mind as a very good point of reference. 

Ladislas Starevich’s 1911 film The Cameraman’s Revenge

This extremely early Soviet stop frame animation had a real sense of charm about it and encapsulated the idea of animating small creatures using photography.
We therefore started looking at utilising some of the existing shots that weren’t selected for the final print version. We discovered they still had lots of natural charm and movement and when stitched together started creating a really interesting and dynamic piece of motion. 

After making all the selects from a mountain of images from the initial shoot we started to piece together the animation by lining up, scaling and distorting all the images so they sit perfectly on a timeline. We then integrated all the wonderful colour that was created in retouch and applied it to the animated sequence thus giving as exact matching aesthetic to the original stills. 

At The Operators we feel passionately about the convergence between the dynamics of photography and video, still and motion, print and digital. We strive to facilitate all these wonderful mediums into one practice, IMAGEmotion.
Track: Moriarty – Private Lily
Photography: Jillian Lochner