Eye Candy
Andrew Huang’s award-winning video, “Solipsist”
When Andrew Thomas Huang, an experimental filmmaker who studied Fine Art and Animation at USC, got inspired to create Solipsist as a video short, it came to him like an epiphany. “I was in my car, turning at an intersection, and suddenly the idea for the film took me completely by surprise,” Huang has said. “When I got home I began sketching out ideas for performance-based scenarios in which two or more characters struggled to converge with each other.”
He spent two months on pre-production. “I had so many other influences factored in—everything from coral reef structures to Tibetan and Balinese costumes, textiles, and jewelry. I looked at videos of Noh theater and Polynesian dance rituals, as well as time-lapse footage of starfish and animal decomposition on the sea floor. The theme of transience took me to Buddhist and Navajo sand paintings for inspiration.” The actual shoot took two days, and then he spent nine months doing the post-production special effects himself, between other jobs. The result won a 2012 Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short at Slamdance, the alternative film festival that takes place at the same time as Sundance in Park City, Utah. It led Huang to Björk, for whom he ended up doing the music-video for “Mutual Core”:
