SUNNY AFTERNOON
Thomas Renoldner
6 min 50 sec, 2012
24 fps, dolby digital 5.1
Production format: digital photography, scans, digital editing
Techniques used: Drawings on paper, rotoscopy, object animation, pixilation, time lapse
photography, combinations of some of those techniques.
Screening format: DCP, HD-Cam, 35mm
Concept, Direction, Animation, Music, Actor, Producer: Thomas Renoldner
Photography: Florian Flicker (1992), Muzak (2011), Thomas Renoldner
Sound-design, music: Lonesome Andi Haller
Additional drawings: Adrienn Kiss
Additional digital compositing: Clemens Kogler
Assistance: Muzak
TEXT BY ROBERT BUCHSCHWENTER about SUNNY AFTERNOON:
Sunny Afternoon: a title that evokes associations with time. Time that passes slowly as you
look out a window, watching the clouds and yourself as you watch. Time whose transience is
clearly obvious. In other words precious time. Precious just like everything else that possesses
the bittersweetness of both promises and transience. Time is in fact very important in Sunny
Afternoon. First there are the 20 years that passed between work on this film began and its
completion, which vanish in a moment of deviation, of brief confusion. And then the careful
apportionment of time through a montage of single frames (from varying perspectives) that
depict a person sitting and standing back up in a natural movement. This turns into an
artificially animated expanse of motion. And finally the playful way in which the awareness
of time is heightened by means of a transition from a rigid structural principle to an almost
frivolously free form. The game with time becomes a game with expectations — expectations
that Renoldner creates with the appropriate earnestness and formal skill of an avant-garde
artist, only to derail them with the sense of humor of someone who reveals a formal
consequence to be an agreeable convention. The filmmaker-cum-composer becomes a
(singing) commentator on himself — and on a composition that makes use of various
techniques and principles, though not to subject itself to them, but to use them for penetrating
borders in a carefree manner, borders between avant-garde and pop, concrete and abstract,
and reality that has been experienced or only imagined. Sunny Afternoon ends with a
drawing of the filmmaker, who ages by years in just a few seconds. Time leaves its marks on
his face, and eventually makes them disappear completely (on a white background). The
transience referred to here may be a higher law, but the manner in which laws are applied is
left up to whoever has the choice of obeying them slavishly or dealing with them in a playful
manner.
THOMAS RENOLDNER ABOUT "SUNNY AFTERNOON"
LONG VERSION
„SUNNY AFTERNOON“ is the confrontation of kind of an avantgarde-film with kind of a
musicvideo, putting questions about the conventions, standard taboos and clichés of different
film-“genres”. Also music and sound was taylored to characterise typical clichés of different
genres.
“SUNNY AFTERNOON” has two main film parts.
The first part is kind of a “found footage”-film, using only 16 photos of a simple movement
shot in 1992, and explores the richness of possible variations and combinations of this very
limited source material. This film also follows a “visual music”-concept, when each
photograph of the movement is connected to one precise tone of a twelve-tone-scale. Thus the
structure of the images defines the musical structure.
At the same time this film part adds unusual humoristic elements to this usually more
academic genre of ‘structural film’.
The second film part in “SUNNY AFTERNOON” intends to break some of the typical rules
of classical avant-garde film, it enjoys a more intuitive workflow, allows almost kitschy
sequences such as time-lapse photos of clouds on a blue sky or playful experiments with four
different, rotating black chairs. This film part also combines a variety of different techniques
like drawings (animated and still), photography, time lapse photography, rotoscopy, object
animation, pixilation, and partly combines these techniques.
This it explores different levels of depiction: images of reality, representation of reality,
illusion and even abstraction and in that way analyses the special possibilities and meanings
of the artistic image.
“SUNNY AFTERNOON” is based on the lyrics of a song composed 25 years ago and brings
a filmproject to an end, which had first started 20 years ago; at that time the first script and the
photos for the first film part were made. So of course this self-portrait is also a reflection
about time. A short introduction adds a few photographs of the author approx. 20 years before
the first film part, and the closing image, carefully drawn by Adrienn Kiss, imagines how the
author might look like 20 years after film part two.
SHORT VERSION:
„SUNNY AFTERNOON“ is the confrontation of kind of an avant-garde film with kind of a
music-video, and thus puts questions about the standard taboos and clichés of both genres.
Both avant-garde film and music-video also parodies music and sound “typical for the genre”.
“SUNNY AFTERNOON” explores images of reality, representation of reality, illusion and
even abstraction and in that way underlines the specific possibilities and meanings of the
artistic image in general.
“SUNNY AFTERNOON” is based on the lyrics of a song composed 25 years ago and brings
a film-project to an end, which had first started 20 years ago. So of course this is also a
reflection about time.
“SUNNY AFTERNOON” is a self-portrait.
VERY SHORT VERSION:
„Sunny Afternoon“ is the confrontation of an 'avantgarde-film’ with a ‚pop-video' and the
analysis of what might be regarded as classical preferences and taboos of both genres. Based
on lyrics of the author when he was 25 years old, Andi Haller has arranged the music
perfectly illustrating the mentioned basical approaches.