Boris Seewald’s “Disco”

After years of staring at a screen editing films, Berlin-based filmmaker Boris Seewald felt compelled to work with a more tactile medium and turned to painting. He dug up unused footage from his previous dance films and employed an animation technique called rotoscoping (think A-ha’s “Take On Me” music video) to translate the footage into a series of paintings by projecting still images of the video onto paper, which he would then use as a guide to paint the two dancers in his short. However, this was not a solo project; Seewald enlisted the help of his wife and then-3-year-old daughter to paint roughly 1,250 images for the film!

For music, he chose the track “Disco,” from the album Moods by his longtime collaborator, composer Ralf Hildenbeutel. The rotoscoping is based on performances by Althea Corlett and Simone Schmidt.