OBSCURER
Crew: Producers: – Screenwriters: Kiera Faber – Drawing Animator: Kiera Faber – Sound Design: Kiera Faber – Cinematographer: Benjamin Faber – Animator: Benjamin Faber – Editor: Benjamin Faber – Voice Actor: Pamela Bacon
Email: mail@kierafaber.com
Web: www.kierafaber.com/Obscurer
Synopsis
A reclusive children’s author and her figmental companions inhabit a fragile microcosm where reality, illusion, and madness intermingle. Stop motion animation seamlessly interweaves with live motion to create an abstract narrative where themes of isolation, mental illness, and loss are enacted through characters that evade trust. Obscurer questions agency, power, and vulnerability within a framework of dysfunction and ambiguity.
Director
Kiera Faber is an experimental filmmaker working within the genre of animation. Her work explores the repercussions of loss and trauma through enigmatic abstract narratives. Faber creates the entire world and experience of a film; from concept and design to image and sound. Her auteur, award winning films are entirely crafted by hand and are internationally screened and exhibited at film festivals, galleries, and museums, most notably the Museum of Contemporary Photography, George Eastman Museum, and the Walker Art Center. Faber received her MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop after completing a BA in Psychology from the University of Rochester. In 2018, Faber received a McKnight Fellowship in Media Arts. She has received numerous regional grants and two film production grants from the Jerome Foundation. Faber currently is in pre-production on THE GARDEN SEES FIRE, supported in part by the Jerome Foundation, creating the surreal and fanciful characters and sets for her next film. She is a dual national of Luxembourg and the United States and resides in Minnesota.
Filmmaker’s Note
Two women were the inspirational roots for OBSCURER; the children’s author Sylvia Cassedy (Behind the Attic Wall. Avon Books, 1983) and a curious individual I observed trimming a tree in her front yard with scissors while wearing welding googles and red coveralls. I molded these women into a fictional depiction of a solitary writer who lives a constrained existence that blurs the line between reality and delusion. She hypnotically writes in an indiscernible script. The language appears linguistically plausible but is semantically meaningless. Her animated companions are psychological manifestations of innocence and malevolence, disparate traits also present in the main character herself. OBSCURER encapsulates my fine art interests and craft aesthetic in filmmaking by incorporating extensive drawing, painting, and sculpture into sets, characters, and stop motion animations. The large three foot armatured characters were a physical challenge in terms of design and construction for stop motion animation. Every aspect of them is crafted by hand; beginning with their custom internal armatures, original sewn bodies patterned from dyed and airbrushed fabric, and poured plastic flesh tinted masks born from silicon molds of sculpted faces. Only one sound in the entirety of the film was recorded live. The remainder is foleyed, bent, or found sound layered together to extend and expand the visual narrative and further the emotional presence of the film. OBSCURER took three years to complete and was supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.
