Pencil Dog (Television Series 2013-)
Todd Van Buskirk is proud to announce a new animated television series, "Pencil Dog." The first season is 22 episodes. As of September 2014, 4 episodes of been created.
The pilot is a 10 second animated walk cycle, drawn and animated in pencil, on repeat for 5:23 minutes, nothing more, nothing less. The following 22 episodes are identical with the pilot episode, with the exception of a new title and episode number in the credit sequence at the front of each episode.
The show will run on YouTube. The pilot and choice episodes will be submitted to film festivals. An IMDB listing will be created for the show.
Todd Van Buskirk's films are absurd in that they focus not on logical acts, realistic occurrences, or traditional character development; they, instead, focus on characters trapped in an incomprehensible world subject to any occurrence, no matter how illogical. The theme of incomprehensibility is coupled with the inadequacy of language to form meaningful human connections.
"The dialectic of repetition is easy," Constantine Constantius writes in Repetition, "for that which is repeated has been- otherwise it could not be repeated- but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new" (149). And because it is easy, for Constantine it is a cure for despair, a state of mind that comes about when an individual is stuck in time, unable to move forward. Constantine reasons that backward movement is not as difficult, since an individual merely needs to repeat a previous action, and then once moving, he is finally free to try the movement forward. Thus repetition is the "actuality and the earnestness of existence" (149). Constantine makes at least two significant attempts to achieve repetition, only one of which succeeds, but it is the attempt that is important, since "he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is " (132).
In Walter Percy’s The Moviegoer, Binx defines repetition as the "re- enactment of past experience" that isolates the time that has passed so that it "can be savored of itself" (80). He offers several examples, one of which involves his seeing again an advertisement for Nivea Creme after twenty years, a repetition that cures him of some of his despair. "The events of the intervening twenty years were neutralized, the thirty million deaths, the countless torturings, uprootings and wanderings to and fro. Nothing of consequence could have happened because Nivea Creme was exactly as it was before" (80).
The pilot is a 10 second animated walk cycle, drawn and animated in pencil, on repeat for 5:23 minutes, nothing more, nothing less. The following 22 episodes are identical with the pilot episode, with the exception of a new title and episode number in the credit sequence at the front of each episode.
The show will run on YouTube. The pilot and choice episodes will be submitted to film festivals. An IMDB listing will be created for the show.
Todd Van Buskirk's films are absurd in that they focus not on logical acts, realistic occurrences, or traditional character development; they, instead, focus on characters trapped in an incomprehensible world subject to any occurrence, no matter how illogical. The theme of incomprehensibility is coupled with the inadequacy of language to form meaningful human connections.
"The dialectic of repetition is easy," Constantine Constantius writes in Repetition, "for that which is repeated has been- otherwise it could not be repeated- but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new" (149). And because it is easy, for Constantine it is a cure for despair, a state of mind that comes about when an individual is stuck in time, unable to move forward. Constantine reasons that backward movement is not as difficult, since an individual merely needs to repeat a previous action, and then once moving, he is finally free to try the movement forward. Thus repetition is the "actuality and the earnestness of existence" (149). Constantine makes at least two significant attempts to achieve repetition, only one of which succeeds, but it is the attempt that is important, since "he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is " (132).
In Walter Percy’s The Moviegoer, Binx defines repetition as the "re- enactment of past experience" that isolates the time that has passed so that it "can be savored of itself" (80). He offers several examples, one of which involves his seeing again an advertisement for Nivea Creme after twenty years, a repetition that cures him of some of his despair. "The events of the intervening twenty years were neutralized, the thirty million deaths, the countless torturings, uprootings and wanderings to and fro. Nothing of consequence could have happened because Nivea Creme was exactly as it was before" (80).