by Sarah Graddy

Nothing’s straight in Brent Green’s world. Watching one of his short animated films is like paying a visit to a crooked, beautiful dream.

You know everything’s a little off, but you can’t quite put your finger on how. And when it ends, you don’t really know what you just experienced, but you’re pretty sure you want more.

You could say Green’s vision is dark. His work is often compared to Tim Burton’s and Flannery O’Connor’s, and he cites Tom Waits, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Fante as influences. The films feature wooden figures, twisted wire, tiny chandeliers with tiny lights, bits of cellophane tape, pencil drawings, paintings, and messages on a chalkboard. Green’s drawn and handmade characters are skinny and look sleep-deprived and weary. But his films are also joyful, reveling in their obvious do-it-yourself aesthetic.

On Oct. 8, Green and Sin Ropas, a band made up of former members of Califone, bring the films set to music to The Atlantic in Gainesville. They’re putting on a show hosted by FLEX (the Florida Experimental Film Festival), a local group that puts on alternative film events around town.
The show will feature a set of Sin Ropas songs and a set of Green’s films with live narration and Sin Ropas’ backing. The touring act has played at the Getty and Hammer Museums in L.A., and in countless other museums and rock clubs, Green says.

To make his films, Green writes a story and puts together a detailed storyboard. When making his first few films, he storyboarded “every single second,” he says, but isn’t as obsessive now. He then builds a world, which can be on a 1:10 scale or—as in his most recent film, Carlin—nine feet tall, and/or creates hundreds of paintings and drawings.

Green uses a Nikon D-70 to take thousands of photos of his sets and drawings, which he lines up in iMovie at fifteen frames per second.
“The movement is fluid, but you still see all the dirt and hair and every little mistake,” he says, not without pride.

The films rely on the sun and his reading lamp for illumination. Green estimates that it takes about a month to make each minute of film.
He used to do every part of the filmmaking himself but now sometimes uses photographers he says outrank him in skill. For Carlin, Green told the photographers the shots he wanted, but didn’t tell them what the film was about. “It must have been really annoying,” he admits.
In addition to making the visuals for his films, Green composes or co-composes and plays much of the music. He plays “anything with strings”—including the guitar, banjo, mandolin, and piano—and was excited about teaching himself to play the musical saw until someone pointed out that it’s basically a giant, flattened string.  “I’m sort of mad at that person for telling me that,” Green says.

Green got started making films, when, he said,  he “wrote a story called ‘Susa’s Red Ears’ and thought it would be a good animated film.” So he decided to make it. He storyboarded it and wrote the music. He was working at the time as a waiter in a town in New York, and when he got fired, he devoted himself to making the film. It took six months. He drew the whole thing himself, shot it, composed and played the music, and edited the whole thing in iMovie.

When he got the piece transferred from his iMac to film, he couldn’t watch it. He had his back to his audience and the film, shaking “really hard” the entire six minutes. Someone told him he should send his film out to film festivals, but he didn’t know what those were, so he sent it to his five favorite musical artists instead. The band Califone wrote back immediately.

Now Green has gallery representation in New York, and makes a living doing what he loves. Two of his films have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival.

“I’m lucky,” he laughs, a little incredulous.

Green’s self-deprecation belies his craft. He says he has to talk himself out of bed every morning, has been fired from every job he’s ever had—gas station attendant, house painter, fence putter-upper, men’s clothing salesman—and is not very good at building things. But he’s actually very satisfied with the work he does now.

“I’m never gonna stop hearing things about how I can’t even draw, but that’s what it looks like in my head,” he says. “The things I make fall apart, but that’s the fun of it—I want my characters to be fragile and they do what they’re supposed to do.”

Green’s films have a sense of urgency, but there’s no message or moral—just the sense that he needs to say something. As each film unfolds, Green chants the narration like a slightly demented poet-preacher, adding a slightly claustrophobic and unsettling feel. With the traces of his invisible hands evident everywhere, the films seem haunted. He seems haunted.

Green lives in a portion of an old barn in rural Pennsylvania that he renovated himself and builds most of his work there. He says he gets lonely but that he’s okay with that.

“I grew up around here, and when I started making a little bit of money, it was the only place I could afford to move and be a full-time artist,” he says. “There’s nothing to do here but work. New York is a few hours away and that’s where my galleries are.”

In Carlin, Green says, “There is euphoria all around you.” And that’s what he wants us to get out of all of his work, I think—life is full of strange and wonderful things, if you pay attention.

“Life is a fucking race,” he says. “You’re gonna die. So make something happen before you do.”