Know Your Indie Filmmaker: Winston Hacking – Cartoon Brew

In this ongoing series, we profile the most interesting independent animation filmmakers working today — the artists who, through short films and other projects, change our ideas of what the medium can do. This week’s subject is Canadian collage and stop-motion animator Winston Hacking. In a sentence: Manic, anarchistic collage hallucinations, Hacking’s work is freewheeling chaos – mind-twirling wonders that seep inside you before you even have a clue why or how. Where to start: Erodium Thunk (2017). A mindbending piece that feels like you’ve wandered into the mind and memory of a child from the 1970s or 1980s, a broken soul littered with fragments of magazine ads and tv commercials. Each ad image is disrupted by pieces of other ads, creating a warped and surreal imagery that combines nostalgia and satire. Hacking takes the safe, familiar images and savagely alters them with all sorts of strange and surreal interruptions. What to watch next: Animal Collective’s “We Go Back” (2022, co-directed with Michael Enzbrunner). Another extraordinary piece of collage work made mostly on a phone, with an assortment of found materials. Other key works: Soupcans’s “Siamese Beauty” (2015), Flying Lotus’s “Post-Requisite” (2017), Washed Out’s “Burn out Blues” (2017) Influences: “Being traumatized
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