Once every few years, prompted by the perfect amount of rain and the precise amount of seed covering, the desert explodes with flowers. The sudden transformation of endless brown into spectrum-bursting red, yellow, purple and green — as far as the eye can see — will uplift even the most hardened of souls., turning dull brown into vibrant red, yellow, purple and green.
Aerate asked artist Jeff Scher to animate this phenomena and the result is spectacular: a creative triumph as dramatic as the visual one. It looks easy, as many brilliant things do, but to produce the animation Scher first painted a 25’ long watercolor then tracked its length with a camera powered by an automated rig.
How did he come up with the idea? “Driving across West Texas I joked to my wife that we kept passing the same cactus. Sure enough, every ten seconds the exact same cactus seemed to float by. This went on for hours and hours. I felt like I was stuck in a cycling background in a movie about driving through the desert. So when I had the opportunity to make a film about the desert I immediately thought about that background loop.”
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Related: SuperBloom Season is Coming: Check Out the Photos
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Scher combined his road-trip experience with a long-held appreciation the oft-overlooked parts of the animation process.
“Backgrounds in traditional animation have always fascinated me. Painted on paper, they have a very different feel than the characters, which are painted on sheets of plastic. It’s wonderful to look past the characters and marvel at the painterly magic behind them. So my point of departure for this animation was how to tell the story — how a big rain makes a SupeBloom — with a looping background.
This entire animation was painted with acrylic gouache on a roll of adding machine paper. At 2.5” wide and about 25’ long, the small scale was great for exaggerating my brush-strokes and creating miles of landscape with ease. Having it roll-able let me crank it from one spool to another in an improvised rig while photographing it. I used the loop twice, once as dry desert and then again with the foliage added. The rain was painted on the background and was animated by the increments of the pan. Some of my films have generated steamer trunks of drawings, but happily this one could be rolled up on a pencil.”
And that’s how you turn pen and paper into a desert bloom.