Dir: Johannes Nyholm
Sweden, 2008, 18’
Prod: Johannes Nyholm
Puppetboy is sweating floods of clay, preparing for a lady´s visit. He gets even more nervous when she arrives.
Johannes Nyholm
Born in 1974, Johannes Nyholm is a film director, artist and animator living in Gothenburg, Sweden. He holds a MA in film, art and new media from the universities of Lund, Copenhagen and Gothenburg, and a degree in classical animation from Eksjö.
Since a few years, his work has centred on the neurotic figure Puppetboy, a dreamlike shadow play from the dark woods and two feature-length scripts.
Before that, he directed several music videos. His work is often very hands-on realistic, but with a dreamlike, contrasting dimension. He likes to play with different perspectives, different scales, micro and macro cosmos, challenging our common sense observations, giving our trivial life an air of mysticism and romanticism.
I started to work with this film after getting fed up with, and also fired from, a very nerdy computer research job. As a contrast I wanted to do something concrete, use my hands and tell simple stories – so I found a lump of clay and made a grotesque caricature of myself. An important principle behind the film was to work really quickly. To make a film that didn’t need special equipment, and at a very small cost. I used a pretty simple digital camera and the building material was mostly junk from my studio. I wanted to put all design aspects aside to focus entirely on the energy, the timing and the story. I wanted to create something raw and simple, yet sensitive and dramatic.
Another idea was to make an animation that was shot a bit like a documentary. Simple, natural lighting and long takes, focusing on the small minutiae of everyday life. The things that happen when nothing happens: vacuum cleaning the apartment, silence in conversations, exchanging glances. And on top of that some old traditional slapstick. A minimalist approach in some respect, and a very expressionistic in another – a mix between nothing and everything. The idea was to finish the film in a week. I ended up working on it for four years.
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