The characterful, visual madness of strange figures unfolded in an intuitive, surreal narrative: this is roughly how the world of the animation, which was created by Júlia Farkas as the first Hungarian artist in the Adult Swim Smalls series, can be summarized.
Adult Swim is known for its bold cinematographic content, including the greatly successful Robot Chicken and Rick and Morty series. They also provide opportunities for young creators to unfold: various animation creators are asked to produce short films, ID spots or promos. Launched in 2018, Adult Swim Smalls allows young directors from all over the world to make short films given complete free hand—in the motion picture and television industry, it’s especially great that the client does not get involved in the creative process, only provides financial help.
Júlia Farkas was approached by the Adult Swim team in the spring of 2019. “I got really excited because I already knew the channel and I always felt in parallel with them,” Juli said.
Juli first showed them the idea for a sci-fi-themed mini-series, but in the end, the money was only enough for a short film with the title Big Crunch. The two-minute movie is a completely spontaneous, free association of visual madness, in which the different situations are connected by the transforming figures into a single continuous scene. Futuristic, surreal images are accompanied by a strange world of dark sounds. “I already knew in the brainstorming phase that I wanted a film that didn’t have a classic narrative, I was rather interested in physics and visual oddities,” Juli pointed out.
“Since I’m basically an intuitive creator, I thought I had to rely on that; it allowed me to build the strange world in the movie and gave a sense of universal consistency. I had a firm idea on sound design, I managed to find the right sound in some scenes, but it was more of a game for me,” she added.
The creator summarizes the concept of Big Crunch as follows:
“The Universe is in constant motion: this strange and surreal theory is the basis of this mini-project. The expansion of the universe cannot last forever, there will come a moment when it will change direction, retreat and the Big Bang will be repeated in reverse: the gigantic mass will collapse into a singularity. Big Crunch is a completely spontaneous, free-associative visual thought process—I am constantly melting the various situations into the present. According to some theories, this happened countless times in the past, and our Big Bang was only possible by the destruction of an earlier Universe.”
Juli’s future goals include the short film appearing in the repertoire of various festivals, so she is now focusing on its afterlife. Until then, immerse yourself in the strange world of Big Crunch!
Animation: Júlia Farkas
Sound design: Péter Benjámin Lukács
Adult Swim Smalls | Web
Júlia Farkas | Instagram
The strange creatures of Júlia Farkas have already appeared in our #stayhomecreative series, where they seized the Szent István Square in Budapest.
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