Drawing on childhood memories, folk art, and nature, the London-based illustrator and model maker creates expressive sculptures and puppets that inhabit dreamlike realms. Invoking historical costumes and cartoonish and emotive faces, Johnston's otherworldly cast seems both familiar and strange, as if children's book protagonists have sprung to life or converged with a strange dream.
In order to create a unique visual language for the single, Julia embarked on a three-month-long project of handcrafting and painting 300 individual ceramic tiles to make up the music video frames, each with their own beautiful irregularities and imperfections in glaze. Structured in grids of twelve, these tiles were swapped out like puzzle pieces in the final stop motion, using zoetropes and evolving motifs to follow "the meditative rhythm of the song through repetition, noise, and texture", the artist says.
It's worth stressing this now, especially in light of the controversy surrounding its release on Vimeo a few months ago, where it was given the coveted Staff Picks badge (guaranteeing it thousands more views), then quickly taken down two days later for fear of its graphic content by Vimeo's Legal and Trust & Safety team for being inappropriate for younger viewers. Luckily (or not, depending on the circumstances), YouTube has very few safeguards against content.
When describing how obsessed he was as a kid with Mary Shelley and the Romantics, an artistic movement from the early 19th century, he concluded, "I discovered I was a 14-year-old girl in Victorian times." The audience laughed before he'd even finished his sentence. Getting the reaction he likely intended (though he said it in complete sincerity), the beloved writer-director introduced his 13th and latest film-an adaptation of Shelley's infamous 1818 novel-with confidence.
I am a bit of a romantic,' game director Johan Oettinger told me, describing the relationship between the game's playable characters, Karla and Kurt. Typically, 'they can talk about anything. But they find themselves in a moment in their relationship with something new in the air.' But sadly, Oettinger added, 'they can't find the words' to say how they feel. Out of Words is a coming-of-age love story about the things we want to say but don't know how.
