Channel Frederator Blog

Your insides - the final frontier. Seems like it would take a lot of work and brainpower to uniquely interpret the inner workings of the human body (and then some). Zhivko Dimitrov, director of “Body” tells us how he did it.

Channel Frederator: Where did you study animation?

Zhivko Dimitrov:Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. I was on the Communications Design program, so it was really a melting pot of typographers, photographers, digital media geeks and other weirdos - not your typical animation school… Didn’t really teach anything about animation, but a fair deal of insight on conceptual thinking and experimentation. Took me a while to realize those matter so much more, but I think just in time to make the most of it

CF: What techniques did you use to create the look of your film?

ZD: Really, anything I could get my hands on… having spent 3/4 of the year figuring out a concept I was so so hungry for design I just wanted it all… there’s a lot of stop-motion, a huge amount of video, some green screen life action, some drawings, bits of proper 3D… I really didn’t care about the technique, I knew the look I was after and that defined the appropriate technique…

CF: What was the most difficult part of making it?

ZD: The concept, really.. there’s this very complex inspiration behind the peace drawing on philosophical concepts of phenomenology and Foucault’s writings on sexuality… I know I know you can’t see it in the final piece, I never meant to communicate it, but i did need all that research and theory to get me inspired on a subject. So I spent a fair amount of time reading and theorizing on reality, perception, and hm.. the duality of body and mind before I started translating all of those influences to visual experiments. That was the hard part, once I had the inspiration and the concept the visual language kind of developed on its own.

CF: What was your favorite part of making it?

ZD: Experimenting. Oh the fun of finding out ways to visualize an underwater coral reef with human body parts only… The whole production was an amazing ride of experimental visualization - from stirring a jar of intestines and making blood out of corn syrup to spending an afternoon in the bathtub floating 5 wigs attached to a spoon or squeezing a kilo of toothpaste out of punctured plastic bags… I loved the problem-solving in stop motion, I loved pushing myself to new medias - had to learn knitting and sweltering and baking clay… so yes, the best part really was experimenting.

CF: Are you working on anything new you can tell us about?

ZD: Professionally I am now back to networked media, but my next personal project is again in motion and already in the cooking - I am thinking of making a documentary on the history of the ficus in Bulgaria. I have this theory that the history of the ficus in Bulgaria can be a metaphor for the history of freedom in the country - during communism people had no choice for plants so everyone had a ficus in their flat… when communism fell and people could have anything they wanted a flood of ficuses went to the trash bins…. and everyone got a palm. Now everyone has a palm, I think we’ve just switched to a different prison…

CF: We can’t wait to see it! Thanks for the interview, Zhivko!

You can check out “Body” right here on Channel Frederator!

-Bailee DesRocher