You gotta dig the latest from PES. If you haven’t caught this spot for Sneaux Shoes take a second and watch before you read the rest of this. Taylor caught up with PES recently for the interview series we’ve been running here on the site. I have a whole new appreciation for Pac Man now.
THE ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 3
PES
Animator, “Game Over” (2006)
Interviewer: Taylor Jessen
Date: 10/27/2006
Transcribed by: Taylor Jessen
Interviewee in: Harlem, New York
Animation Show: What techniques did you try in this short that you hadn’t done before?
PES: The concept of Game Over was to take something electronic and remake it by hand, and essentially do it in this style that I’ve been developing where familiar objects that look like other things are swapped in. This is a style that obviously I’ve been working on for a few years now, and I used it in KaBoom!, but this is basically a re-creation of something that’s computerized or electronic, done by hand. And also, a lot of the lore surrounding old video games is virtually unknown to the general public. For instance very few people know that the original Pac-Man character was modeled after a pizza. And this is confirmed by the creator of Pac-Man in a couple interviews that are online. And I thought that that was a beautiful idea – but let’s put that together in the most direct form. Let’s actually animate a pizza as a Pac-Man with a missing slice. That’s just an example of some interesting background thing that I thought was cool to bring to life.
AS: Was the pizza-fied Pac-Man the kernel that got you started on the rest of the short?
PES: No, there were a lot of video games that I like, and there were a lot that I consider classics. The kernel was to do what I consider to be the founding fathers of video games as we know it. The games that I featured, they weren’t the first. Obviously there are others. But what I did like about each of the five that I chose is that they were all first at something. They made enormous steps. Not only were they all very popular but they actually managed to be defining moments in video game history. For instance, Centipede was the first game that was more popular with women than men, which is interesting. Of course later on Ms. Pac-Man was another successful effort there. Then you have Asteroids, and the one thing that Asteroids brought to gaming was, you had a list. If you were in the top ten, you could put your name in. That was a first. And Frogger was one of those games that was built on time, which was a different concept as well. That’s one of the reasons why I chose to use watches as the turtles. Not only do they look like little turtles, but the whole concept of the game is time, essentially. It’s only time before the logs go by and the turtles go down.
AS: I love the fact that you’ve replaced the sinking turtles with watches – the frog is literally on the clock. Not only is the thing going to sink when the clock reaches X, the clock itself is the thing that’s about to collapse under you and kill your character.
PES: It’s almost frightening how much like the turtles those little watches look. Because they have legs, and the little thing you pull out to wind the watch looks like the turtle’s head. I’ll do a “making of” for this thing soon, but if you really do put it up against the turtles in the original game, they have four legs and a head. It’s crazy. But again, it’s just thinking about objects and making them relevant to the game itself. Another thing that Frogger did that was a first was incorporate really distinctive music. And then there’s Pac-Man, which, yes, has some predecessors, but was really one of the first major, major games. All these games were major inventions… I’d have to look back and see exactly what it was that made Space Invaders unique. But I do know that it was incredibly popular in Japan, so popular that it actually caused a coin shortage in the country. And there are pictures out there of arcades in Japan that are filled with only Space Invaders. (laughs) It was a huge hit here, and many people consider it to be the first international video game hit, the one that really took video games out of the bar and into the roller rinks and all the cool places that kids were.
AS: Space Invaders was a huge leap forward from Pong in terms of drama. In Space Invaders the acceleration really ratchets the tension – the music speeds up and the aliens speed up and they get closer and closer. It’s a much more emotionally dynamic game.
PES: Yeah. It was really one of the first compelling video games. It was a big hit. It wasn’t as big a hit in the U.S., although it is obviously one of the founding fathers. I grew up with these games, so I love them. And one of the things I also think is interesting is that kids are rediscovering these classics. And it does feed into the effort to make a timeless film, in a sense that these are and will be always the founding fathers of video games. There’s no changing that fact. So I thought it would be really neat to take them out of that electronic zone and possibly make them more beautiful than they were, and they were of course beautiful. (laughs) Especially games like Centipede with a kind of Technicolor gleam, the changing mushrooms and so on.
AS: You have a cabinet of curiosities in your studio with tchochkes you’ve collected from all over the world, and what I like about Game Over is that for each game you’ve explored a different theme in the materials. With Space Invaders everything is flora and fauna, beetles and leaves and flowers.
PES: I have several different versions of Space Invaders that I’d like to make, actually, and that’s the one that I chose to make for this film. The initial idea of these colorful beetles at different sizes in a museum – those are real beetles moved on pins, so everything’s real. The whole organic nature was interesting to me. And then of course I worked in the eating away of the leaves, because in the original game, one of the great things was how you could chip away at those little block protectors.
AS: Sure, you could drill up through those shields and shoot the aliens from underneath, which was a little safer than standing between the shields.
PES: Yeah, that’s the thing – you’re really supposed to use those as protectors. There were lots of different p0rts of Space Invaders that were easier than the original game. The original game is really tough, but you don’t often shoot through those things, because they’re so valuable to you as blockers. But yet as a child, I just remember – when you had to get to an alien, you would just nail through that block. That was so satisfying… In all these films I wanted to leave narrative behind. I’ve been progressively doing that as an experiment with some of my films. A lot of them have a beginning, middle, and end, and you could follow a little story. But this one in particular is free from narrative, and I thought that was also experimental for me. In each sequence, I was trying to capture the core essence of each game, in the most exciting way. And obviously the thing that threads them together is that in every sequence, the principal character dies. And then the game is over, which works back into the title.
AS: And yet all these games are basically miniature dramas, aren’t they? And some arcade games even spelled out their back story in between games, you know – “Due to a genetic engineering error, you possess superhuman powers…your mission is to stop the Robotrons, and save the last human family…!”
PES: Yeah – video games are narratives in disguise. It’s all life and death. (laughs)
AS: Did you have to go out and find raw materials for these, or is this all made of stuff that you already had?
PES: Oh, no. Some of the things are things that I had. But once I had the initial concept, I really did have to conceive the world – for instance, what would the mushrooms be in Centipede? What natural form looks like a mushroom? And I just decided that muffins do, in a weird way, and that I would take a sugar-coated approach to Centipede that was built on birthday candles and a cupcake centipede. In Centipede it was mostly sweets. The shooter is an old sugar shaker, and obviously there are the cupcakes, and the bullets are birthday candles. And then of course in Space Invaders, the concept was to do a more natural approach. And that really plays against the electronic nature of the game, and that’s why I thought that that was one of the coolest ideas about doing Space Invaders that way. I have to say that the original designer of the game modeled his invaders after crabs, so that actually could be another version of the game, but I still thought the beetles were cooler.
AS: An organic representation of a digital alien based on something organic. Nice…and the Asteroids segment does the same thing. It’s going back to an organic representation of the original inspiration for the game, which is big rocks in space. I can’t quite make out what the spaceship is…
PES: The spaceship is actually a shark tooth. And I liked that because we associate sharks with hunters. (laughs) And this is a thirty-five million year-old shark tooth that’s fossilized, and bizarrely it looks exactly like that little triangular ship from the game. And of course I like to contrast textures. That’s why I like that flame of the candy corn. Something incredibly fleeting – they come out at Halloween, and they’re gone by Thanksgiving – with something that’s been on the Earth for thirty-five million years. (laughs)
AS: Your stop-motion here is all very, very smooth. How long did one segment take you to finish? How long did the whole piece take?
PES: I worked on it for three months. I do a lot of commercials now, and even when I’ve done short films, sometimes I’ve had help – a cinematographer, an assistant here and there, whatever. I really wanted, as an exercise, to come up with a concept that I could execute completely on my own. I just felt like it would be a challenge, and I want to keep myself doing that. I don’t know how long each segment took.
AS: So it was a crew of one?
PES: It was just me. I did everything. I had to go out and shop for the items, and obviously go to the museum to get the beetles. One of the things that’s lovely about making films like this, which I really do like, is that you learn about the world by just getting out there, getting stuff. And those things lead to ideas about next films, you know? So the more time I spend in the little Evolution Shop looking at beetles, the more ideas I tend to get about other stuff.
AS: Cool job, to have to go out and hang out in these shops.
PES: Yeah. It’s exciting. And to be honest, I just wanted to experience it on my own again, and to challenge myself. Obviously I have a studio here in Harlem, but I really think it’s a challenge for an individual to make a film. Film is known as a collaborative medium, and to a certain extent that’s true, but at the same time I wanted to put out there the fact that a single human being can make a successful film on their own, provided they have a concept that has legs.
AS: Were you coming right out of a commercial campaign when you started on this? Did you need a break?
PES: I did one over Christmas. Actually, to tell you the truth, in the middle of those three months, I took two and a half weeks off to do a commercial so that I could pay for the film.
AS: No excuse needed there. That’s your meal ticket.
PES: You know what, I just remembered – one of the things about Asteroids that makes it all so unique is not only that you can plug in your name at the end, but that the ship itself moves organically. All the other games, especially the ones featured in the film, they all moved on preordained routes.
AS: Yes, it’s all moment-to-moment in Asteroids, totally chaotic. You can’t strategize and you can’t have a pattern.
PES: Exactly. It’s funny because there are people who know these games so well – there’s actually a Website, believe it or not, right now that’s keeping track of all the highest scores for all these games. Kids are playing them a lot now. And maybe they’re smarter than we were when we were kids, because they’re breaking all the records. So the world record for Frogger will be held by some kid who’s born in 1993. (laughs) It’s cool, that there is a resurgence and an interest in the early games.
AS: Do you own any original coin-op games?
PES: No. There’s this bar I go to in Williamsburg called Barcade, and they have about 40 standup systems around a bar. It’s cool. Next time you’re in New York, man…
AS: The one I can’t get off is Galaga. That’s always rocked my world. And Tempest is very difficult to find now.
PES: Tempest is essentially the most beautiful vector graphic game… I’m actually contemplating doing a Game Over 2 because I have other ideas that I think are really cool for doing more games. I really did want the first version to be the founding fathers. But there are other cool games. Tempest is one of them. Not many people know this, but the person who designed Missile Command also designed Tempest. It was based on a dream that the guy had, about a monster constantly coming out of a hole at him. (laughs)
AS: On the Pac-Man segment I can see you’ve got a wider proscenium than ever. That’s a goodly amount of floor space you’re working with. Did you have to get up on a ladder to work out the camera positioning?
PES: Yeah. The last sequence, the idea there from the beginning was pizza. That really dictated the scale of the set. So I had to position the camera on a ladder, and shoot down, and I used those bocce balls as the pellets.
AS: What’s the big magic dot, the energizer?
PES: The red dotted ball is just a dirty ball I thought was cool. I picked it up at a flea market years ago, and my dog plays with it. It’s funny because for some of the objects, I go through a lot of planning, and then for other objects you grab what’s at your disposal. So a lot of it is heavily thought-out concepts, and then I always amuse myself at how throwaway something can be. So for instance the red ghost in Pac-Man (laughs), it’s just a dustrag on my floor. Actually the real challenge in the Pac-Man was to fry the real eggs.
AS: Yes, how did they hold up under your lights?
PES: They held up well, as you can see. If you fry them enough, they congeal and preserve. They don’t hold overnight, but they certainly hold for a good three hours.
AS: And the pretzel, did you go out on the street and get one from a vendor?
PES: Yeah, those are lovely kitsch items from vintage New York, you know? I always wanted to use one, because it’s just bizarre that it even exists.
AS: It’s an icon. It’s been everywhere. It’s been on the cover of a Steely Dan album – how can you turn it down?
PES: Right, Pretzel Logic, yeah. (laughs) I’m trying to think what else is in there…
AS: What’s the wall of the maze in Pac-Man?
PES: It’s going to underwhelm you, but – those are just lids from Ikea storage boxes. They have these great little plastic boxes. Actually what I did was, I slid in some violet-colored foam to push up the purple color. I’d just had a feeling that purple would work for that. I don’t know why. Again, a lot of things around the house could have possibly worked for that, but the boxes ended up just being around and being right. They definitely fit in that last-minute inspiration thing.
AS: It’s all a question of getting raw materials and keeping them, isn’t it? Run Wrake made Rabbit out of some educational stickers he got at a junk shop, and they sat around in his archive for twenty years before they got used.
PES: That’s one of the reasons I collect objects from everywhere I go in the world. Those bocce balls that I used in Pac-Man, I bought them at 4am at a flea market in Brussels. The markets happen way before the crack of dawn there, and I bought it for three Euros, this lovely little set of old wooden balls. I had no use for them. I just thought it was cool. But I brought them home, and two years later, they worked their way into this short. So I buy stuff everywhere – just things that I like, and sometimes I don’t even understand why I like them. A ball with a certain texture could strike your fancy. Whatever it is, if that need to possess strikes me while I’m at a flea market or trash sale or whatever, I buy. And I don’t buy super-expensive antiques, I buy beautiful found objects. And I don’t put them in boxes. I don’t store them away. I keep them on shelves as a kind of cabinet of curiosities. And what that does for me is it allows me to constantly keep all these objects in mind. And inevitably I start writing concepts for them. Or they keep coming into my concepts. Who knows. But I’m not a packrat. I actually look to them for inspiration.
AS: There is one thing missing from the PES Website, which is a Quicktime VR movie of your studio. That would be pretty sexy for your fans, I think, to see that cabinet.
PES: (laughs) It’s got a bunch of bizarre things. But a lot of them are very tiny, so people think that it’s probably enormous. The truth is, there’s a lot of little things.
AS: That flea market instinct can be tough to maintain. You go to the market because of your Id but there’s always that goddamn Superego. When I hit the monthly swap meet at Pasadena City College one part of me that’s completely subconscious makes me go back and fondle some Japanese postcard, and I don’t know why I’m interested, and I can’t ask it questions, but it wants, wants, wants. And then there’s that completely rational voice that says “You have $4.35. Do you really need this? It’s not in mint condition, and you can probably get them cheaper on the internet. Did you change your oil? Now hurry or you’re going to be late.” And it’s hard to squelch that adult and listen to the child saying “Cool!”, but you’ve got to seize the moment, because this thing won’t be here next week.
PES: Yeah. And the other thing is, when you make films like this, one of the things you realize is, you can never find something when you’re looking for it. So that’s why I buy things that I might potentially see a use for. It’s one of those things I’ve learned the hard way. (laughs)
AS: We talked about your approach to viral filmmaking in our last interview. Are your films still escaping from PES.com and showing up on other people’s sites?
PES: What’s happened with Game Over virally is – a good film makes an audience want to see it. And it’s gotten out there. I did post it on my Website briefly. But it’s escaped other ways. We send out DVDs, and I have a commercial showreel that goes out, and it’s on there now. But yeah, it’s a small Quicktime, so it probably was pulled off my site as well. And then with each generation, people degrade it even more, so… But you know, the concept still comes through, and it’s really exciting to see what happens when you post something, and then people just want to see it.
AS: I love how YouTube is so much like Napster was five years ago, in that people everywhere are appropriating material from their own library basically to amass this online reference library where the selection is fantastic, you have NO idea where anything came from, and the quality levels are all over the map. It’s a weird paradise / dystopia / no man’s land, where it’s wonderful and it’s also hell.
PES: Yeah – and I do feel like it’s important to put my name on my films. I do feel authorship is important. They are unique to me. I also feel it’s important for people out there to know that there is a home for my work, where they can see my cuts, my versions of everything. I’ve learned that when you put a web site at the end of a film, at least it allows interested parties to come to the home, essentially. And this is interesting because however I release a film, I find that people respect the titles. People don’t chop your name off. Even if they rip it off my web site and put it on theirs, many, many times it’ll still say “Hey, love this film, check out more films at…” and they’ll even personally put up a link. So there’s a give-and-take. I like to give to people. You know what I mean? I’m not charging for those films, and I’d liked them to be shared, and I feel like the community just naturally has a balance of giving back. Which is refreshing.
AS: A lot of that has to do with the quality of the material. The better it is, the more people will respect it and not want to cut it up – and your pieces are very tight, nothing is extraneous. Even the title pages are often these wiggy found images that no one’s seen before, that people want to continue to associate with that piece, so they leave it intact.
PES: Yeah. I think it’s interesting because authorship is becoming even more important on the web. There’s an enormous amount of content out there. But who are the creators of original content? Who are the emerging brands? Who are the Beatles of the film content-creating community? Who are the Stones? Who is Led Zeppelin? I mean, they were making three-minute songs, right?
AS: Who do you think they are? Name someone you think might qualify for that distinction.
PES: I don’t know. I’d have to think about that. I certainly use it as a model for myself.
AS: So you’re basically approaching your job as a maker of three-minute pop singles for the video trading community.
PES: Yeah. There’s a struggle – we all want to make hits. And the truth is, in music, people made hits, and some of them were timeless, and we listen to them forty years later, and some of them were in and out in a couple months. And a lot of the films that you see on sites like Atom Films are very topical, very make-fun-of-George-Bush and stuff, and those things can get enormously popular for a couple months, but their lasting value is questionable. So I think it’s a challenge to be able to make content that survives. Timelessness is the greatest test of any art. And I really do think about that stuff when I decide to make an idea. I really think, a hundred years from now, will people still find it interesting to look at? It’s part of my challenge. I like to answer yes to that question, that it will have value, and that the value won’t be tied to its date.
AS: It really gives me pause to think about some of that data sitting around on my hard drive – this little digital movie file is identical to what it was ten, thirteen years ago, but when I first viewed it, I was a different person, the world was a different place, and I might be looking at an artist who’s dead. It’s its own little time capsule. But I can still fuck with it and cut it up if I want to. Which makes keeping the credits intact even more important.
PES: It’s scary. But that’s why I think that a certain notoriety for an artist is protection, essentially. The more people who know who is the creator of certain types of films – in a way, that’s protection. It’s the people who don’t build their identity, who show no interest in authorship – it’s weird, I mean, painters weren’t even always signing their paintings. This whole concept of authorship is a fascinating one, and it hasn’t been around for more than 500 years. I don’t even know when it started, but it didn’t start 2000 years ago. I just think it’s interesting… (laughs)
AS: Have you been doing any commercial campaigns lately?
PES: I just finished one that’s going up on my Website this week. That was done out of London for a company called Orange. Big advertiser, basically biggest cell phone company in Europe. And I also spent August and September in London shooting two spots for PlayStation Portable, the little hand-held PlayStation. Interestingly, though, the PlayStation one is not stop-motion. It’s live action with some CGI work on it.
AS: You’ve worked in live action before.
PES: Yeah. And this was a good opportunity for me to do some more work there, just to shake things up a little and not just do stop-motion. Advertising tends to (laughs) see you in one certain way, and this was a chance to do something different… And now I’m working on a new film. Did I tell you about the fireplace? This is the next big thing that I’m going to put out there. It’s a holiday DVD. It’s a recreation of the classic Yule log. You know that TV show that runs every Christmas, it’s just a fireplace that runs?
AS: You mean like a DVD fish tank?
PES: Exactly. It’s me doing a fireplace with my objects. It’s a party DVD, essentially. It’s a very short loop, but it’s fun, and it’s good for pot-smoking. (laughs) No, essentially it’s a simple iconic loop of a little fireplace, made with pretzel logs and candy-corn flames.
AS: So is there going to be a PES shop online?
PES: This DVD will be sold online, yes. It will be the first thing that I will sell through my web site. And I don’t know, we’ll see how the market picks it up. Sarah’s also planning some larger distribution with a distributor who’s been interested in doing that for this project. So it’ll probably end up in the stores, too, probably not this year right away. (laughs) But we’re going to take the first crack at an online launch.
AS: Anyone interested in distributing a PES DVD, all the stuff from your web site?
PES: Yes, but to be honest, I actually think that this fireplace is a priority over that. It’s something I need to put out there first. It’s also something that you need to have on your TV. The films themselves, one could argue that they’re ideally viewed in miniature format. (laughs) I mean, there’s something so intimate about the online experience, where the films feel like little jewels in the rough. There’s this exciting moment when you click on something, and you lean in an extra couple inches to peek at what’s there. It’s like you’re looking in a little chink in the wall, in the Blakeian sense, right? Open the door of perception.
|