Woodcut Thrillride Animation

If there’s a medium that can be melded with woodcut prints, Cannonball Press is gonna try and do it. After years of making woodcut installations, giant stick puppets, banners, costumes and performances we’re combining hand-carved woodblock prints made on a 1938 Vandercook proof press with state-of-the-art 3D digital animation software. Old school meets new school in the inimitable Cannonball monochromatic style.

We’re teaming up with acclaimed jazz saxophonist John Ellis, his band Double-Wide and accomplished animator Eric Knisley to create our own 3-minute long woodcut Petrushka.

We’re seeking $3500 to create a video for Ellis’s new composition “Dublinland Carnival,” off his new album “Puppet Mischief.” The video will take the form of a high-speed ride through a funhouse environment populated by barkers, zombies, charlatans, mobsters, liars, strumpets, astro-hogs, hooligans, beat machines, hornheads and sundry beasts, all of whom are puppets themselves.

All the imagery will be rendered in exquisite monochromatic woodcut prints by Mike and Martin of Cannonball Press, made exclusively for this project. Knisley will then take the imagery, animate it, and create a 3D environment for the characters to inhabit.  The POV of the camera will be the POV of the riders going through the funhouse ride.

Apparently it isn’t enough for us just to spend hundreds of hours making these incredibly laborious woodcuts. We gotta animate them too.  But we can guarantee: this thing is going to rock. Please buy a print and help us out!