My Ruff Theater

The whole idea of rough theater is stripping art of its ornamentation and just having the bare essentials. By making something rugged, it feels more accessible and more true to natural life, which is what makes it so appealing at some times, and so terribly un-escapist at other times. The themes in my films are generally pretty outlandish (my favorite works i’ve made include a stop-motion of broccoli sheep getting eaten by a wolf made of okra, and an animation with hand-drawn characters and sounds produced entirely by me to create a window washer who rides a jetpack), but I like to use simple, accessible styles. For the stop motion I mentioned, Green with Envy, I shot with a standard definition handicam, and I think that its low quality and sort of grittiness is what makes it feel really fun and charming (I hope). For the jetpack animation, I wanted it to feel like a four-year old made it (I have the drawing skills of a four-year-old, so it was kind of unavoidable) so that it would have an elementary, homemade quality.

Rough theater also involves using the materials you have at hand to make your vision work. Myself and probably every other near-broke student in this university are very used to finding work-arounds to spend as little money as possible to achieve our artistic visions. For instance, Flicker Film Society went without a sound recorder while shooting our large crew projects this semester, so we hooked a mic into a mixer, and hooked the mixer into a computer recording the audio with Garage Band. A bit ghetto, yes. But it worked (mostly). I think there’s definitely a charm to rough theater, and working with what you have. It forces you to be resourceful and creative, given whatever limitations you are facing. This goes hand in hand with the famous quote that limitations inspire creativity. I think this is absolutely true, because you often find happy accidents when trying to solve a problem, and those accidents end up being way better than anything you had initially planned. They would not be possible without the limitations in the first place. Also, I generally have problems thinking of an idea out of thin air, but when given a set of rules and a bit of a prompt is when my best thinking occurs. So I think the rough theater is really inspiring, and I subscribe to its philosophy on a regular basis.