All These Sons (2021)

Directors: Joshua Altman | Bing Liu
Producers: Joshua Altman | Kelsey Carr | Bing Liu | Zak Piper
Composer: Kris Bowers
Cinematographers: Joshua Altman | Bing Liu
Editors: Joshua Altman | Joe Beshenkovsky | Bing Liu | Jennifer Tiexiera
Storyboard Artist / Animator: David Navas | Jason Carpenter

"All These Sons" IMDB page

I worked frame by frame on transparencies, made collages, created my own film negatives using sequences of drawings, and hand-painted over photographs.

“All These Sons” was a work in progress from day one. It was born as it went along. The documentary follows the lives of two men on Chicago’s West Side who dedicate their lives to educating, empowering, and healing young Black men at high risk of being victims—or perpetrators—of deadly gun violence.

Directors Joshua Altman and Bing Liu didn’t want to explain anything concrete with the animation; their intention was for the graphics to represent emotions, feelings, and tensions, so they opted for pure abstraction.

In a working method inspired by Norman McLaren, who developed a technique of painting onto the optical soundtrack area of the film negatives of his animations, I set about creating multiple elements that would later be edited in different ways depending on what I wanted to convey. I worked frame by frame on transparencies, made collages, created my own film negatives using sequences of drawings, hand-painted over photographs, etc.

90% of all this material wasn't used in the documentary, which ended up being almost entirely filmed footage, but I like to think it served as inspiration for the directors while they were working on the story.

“One must still have chaos inside oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. “ Friedrich Nietzsche

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