Fancy shacking your LEGO?
Friday 18 June, 2010Working on the Surf Film festival for 8 years now, the Wavescape's team have pretty much seen it all. Every cut and burn, soul-arch, legendary, gothic, industry, chick, hippy, doccy, surf porn DVD that's ever been produced, we've seen it and probably screened it.So it'sreally KIFF to feel the stoke coursing through these jaded veins again as we watched the small budget, big hitting surf animation video from French Artist Karim Rejeb. It's seriously epic, and it's been getting a lot of buzz around the net.
It took this dude 3 months to produce a meagre seven minutes of video, so you can conclude that A. he loves surfing, B. he loves LEGO, C. he has a lot of time on his hands, and D. the pursuit of material wealth is not high on his agenda.
In an interview with Surfbang.com magazine, he actually confessed to an almost neurotic need to get his toys shacked, and claimed that "it just feels soooo good". Well, the French are very different to us in many ways, and it's not for us to judge.
We are sure that our arty, educated readers know what stop-motion video is, but for the visiting tourists let's explain. Basically it's just a succession of images played in a row at the rate of fifteen images a second. There are no special effects, and so this is authentic, hand crafted art. Even the big airs are manually produced, and you could spend your lunch-break pondering how the hell that was done. The "wave" in the film is made out of linoleum, which is that plastic stuff that your granny had on her kitchen floor, and turns out it makes perfect barrels for little LEGO chargers.
Seems like our French friend is something of a philospher; when asked what his influences are, he claimed the entire Universe, and went on to add that "we are moving somewhere in between the infinitely big and the infinitely small. What is the purpose then and what is our task? I still don’t know how it is possible when you’re there in the barrel, how many correlations of things to make that happen. Is there a reason? Is there someone at the head of it? Surfing is for me just a place where I get some answers to my questions."
Maybe it makes more sense in French? Anyway, big-up to you Karim, we love your work and if you ever come to South Africa we are going to make a nice little LEGO surf theme park for you! We're thinking maybe on the putt-putt course at Muizenberg beach front?
Anyway, check out the film that Hurley's Jevon Le Roux claims is "probably the most amazing thing he's EVER seen".
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