AVA LUNA - STEVE POLYESTER

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Story of a mythical neighbourhood hero through the eyes of a young girl

Los Angeles based and recent CalArts post-grad filmmaker Angela Stempel, cites growing up in Venezuela that had a delay effect on her coming into the medium of film making and animation. The visual language of her animation film for Brooklyn indie rock outfit Ana Luna matches the surreal and poetic lyrics of the song - and it is made up of roughly 2,800 hand drawings.

'The idea was originally to tell the story of a mythical local hero, through the eyes of a young neighbourhood girl. I was inspired by the music to reference the drawing style of Saul Steinberg, who was a Romanian-American artist and witty illustrator for The New Yorker. I wanted the film to flow from character to abstraction, narrative to beat since all these seemed to be important elements of the song.'

All the characters in the film talk about this larger-than-life hero Steve Polyester. They all project their own desires onto him.

'For me this film is about ideals that are out of reach. I also wanted to somehow translate the feeling of being a kid in the summer with nothing to do and nowhere to go, but free to have adventures in her own imagination. The timeline to make the film was ultimately around 3 months, from the moment I was approached to make it. Every single frame of the animation was hand drawn on the computer during the winter holiday of my first year of grad school at CalArts. The film is made up of roughly 2,800 drawings.'

 

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