Painter, sculptor, and stop motion animator Christiane Cegavske discusses the making of her cult film and what comes next

Transmission 400: Interview with Christiane Cegavske

A true visionary of independent cinema, Christiane Cegavske is a multi-disciplinary painter, sculptor, fine artist, animator, and Associate Professor of Animated Arts at Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University, whose work weaves a deeply personal mythology through highly tactile, surrealist worlds. She is an artist who doesn’t just make films: she constructs entire handmade mythologies. Her work offers an incredible opportunity to dive into the mind of a distinctive and singular auteur, as it is highly tactile, deeply symbolic, and notoriously time-intensive. She is best known as the singular force behind the cult masterpiece Blood Tea and Red String, a dialogue-free, stop-motion feature film that took thirteen years of solo, frame-by-frame devotion to complete, and has been acclaimed as a David Lynchean fever dream set on Beatrix Potter terrain. Drawing inspiration from dreams, natural forms, and organic materials, her stop-motion animation creates immersive cinematic experiences that resist easy interpretation and invite viewers into deeply imaginative worlds, yet find a familiar chord in all human folklore, since there are no cultural or linguistic barriers. Perhaps if we simply tried to listen to the “voice” of the characters she puts on screen, we would understand more about the human/animal condition.

She created the animated parts for the 2004 drama film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which Asia Argento co-wrote and directed. Her second animated feature, Seed in the Sand, has been in production since 2008 and is currently a work in progress. In 2019 she was among the winners of the Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of “Film – Video.”

Featured image: © Christiane Cegavske
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You have spoken before about allowing your narratives to unfold using dream-logic, driven by a personal mythos. When a recurring symbol first arrives in your sketchbook, do you usually understand its psychological weight immediately, or do you discover what it actually means to you only after hours of animating it frame-by-frame? 

I feel the connection, but I do not necessarily interpret its psychological weight right away. I just had a 20th-anniversary screening a couple of days ago, and there are things that people brought up in the Q&A session where I was like, “Oh wow, I’ve got to think about that.” So it’s ongoing. However, there are certain themes where, by the time I’m filming them, they’ve already been circulating in my creative inner life for a while. Because of that, some things are clear-ish and some things are clear, but then, as time passes, the meaning for me shifts as I mature, learn, and make new connections. So, I’d say yes to all and no to some. 

Christiane Cegavske’s work, spanning painting, sculpture, and textile animation, inhabits a surreal, tactile dreamscape where fairy-tale tenderness collides with the macabre.

In your work, characters frequently struggle, lose what they are fighting for, or suffer physical tearing apart, yet there is an undeniable tenderness and beauty to them. How do you balance the macabre and the vulnerable without letting the world of your films tip entirely into a complete nightmare? 

Some of that may just come naturally from my competing loves. It took me a while to realize that my characters were a sort of embodiment of my pre-teen years—I was obsessed with teddy bears as a pre-teen, and also very obsessed with insects and the skeletal structure of things. Then, as an adult, I kind of forgot about the teddy bears, but I started getting into things more like taxidermy. My interests are balanced between the cute and the macabre horror.

I don’t like to watch really intense horror; it makes me feel a little traumatized. There’s a certain level, it’s hard to know where it is, where you’re like, ‘This is cathartic,’ versus feeling damaged for a while as you dig through it. So, I did find it surprising at first that people interpreted my film through a horror lens. However, having seen a number of writings on my film as horror, and learning about what folk horror is versus just straight-out horror, I definitely can see it.

I think keeping it balanced may just be more intuitive for me, based on what I like. First and foremost, I make my artwork based on what I like; I really pay very little attention to a future audience or trying to fit into any particular genre or niche. I’m just not interested in that.

When I first started in the animation industry, I had already been working on my film for some time, but I started meeting people who suggested that I should create a project for pitching to networks and things. So I tried, but I’m just too weird, and I also can’t seem to fit into a genre. I did get a development deal, but the notes on my drawings for my characters kept coming back from the producers saying, “Too scary, too creepy, not for kids.” This very evil, scary-looking wizard, by the end of the process, turned into basically an earth goddess. Then the company went bankrupt, or was absorbed by something else, I don’t remember exactly, it was like 20 years ago, but I was like, “Nope, I make art films.” I worked on commercial films for people as a paid crew member, but my own work is purely for art.

I think it definitely has commercial viability because my last screening just sold out. I have quite a number of sold-out screenings, which is somewhat surprising for a 20-year-old film, but it has actually just grown in notoriety. It was fairly invisible at first, with people being like, “What the bleep is this that I’m looking at?” and then I found my audience. So, I guess it’s like an art film that is, hopefully, moderately commercially viable.

Spending years alone in your studio, moving puppets a fraction of a millimeter at a time, requires a massive amount of mental endurance. How does that profound, prolonged isolation affect your relationship with the characters? Do they begin to feel like distinct collaborators with their own agency while you are animating them? 

They feel very alive to me. As far as I’m aware, I’m perfectly sane, and I know they are just puppets, but on the other hand, they also feel completely alive.

I’d say as far as being alone for an extended period of time, that was more the case with Blood Tea and Red String. I had fewer responsibilities and more free time, so I did spend day after day after day, and I became one with the characters. To the point where, when I would do an attempted secretarial job or something, I’d be working too much to work on my film. One time, I hadn’t gotten a paycheck for a while, and I was taking my lunch break, and I could have sworn one of my creatures was following me, telling me, it was one of the oak dwellers. It wasn’t a hallucination, but it was like when you just feel something in your mind’s eye. I just felt it there on the sidewalk, like it was saying, “Get back to work.”

In my current film, I do have intense periods of working. I teach—I’m a full-time faculty member at Pacific Northwest College of Art—so my time is really intense. I have my time off in the summer when I can really dive in, and I had a 17-day period just a few weeks ago where I did not take a day off. I feel like on the first day of animation, it’s just like, “Oh, I’ve got to get back into this.” The next day, I’m just like, “Oh, every little movement, the character feels like they’re directing it.”

In addition to her work as an independent filmmaker, she is a teacher who has taught animation and mentored emerging artists.

Part of it is just gravity. Gravity impacts how your character will walk and move, or slip and fall, and have to be fixed. I got this little foot movement on my character because I couldn’t keep him in place, but then later I was like, “Oh, it looks so real,” because he looks like he’s slipping against the rock just a little bit and his little toes grab. If I hadn’t had a whole lot of trouble getting him to stay put in that position, I never would have gotten such a cute little movement. So, the characters do impact their animation just based on their bulk and gravity, and in my mind’s eye, they definitely feel like they’re operating a bit in the scene.

One little anecdote: I’ve been working really heavily on animating my new film, and there’s a character with a long beak. I was driving, kind of an extended drive, and I could have sworn, just for a few moments, I could feel a beak on my face, and I was like, “Hmm, maybe I should pull over and rest.” But anyhow, that’s how it is.

You began your career shooting on film without video playback references to instantly check your work. Now, with modern digital tools and the ability to share your day-to-day progress on social media, has the ‘sacred bubble’ of your studio changed? Does technical or instant audience feedback have an influence or cause you to rethink how you make creative decisions in the middle of a scene 

When I’m in there, I’m very much all in. It’s interesting—I never really thought about it as ‘sacred’ exactly, but I think that really does encapsulate the feeling, because it’s a feeling of dedication and flagellation. Because it hurts. Animation is painful, especially as I get a little older; I don’t recall it being as painful in my 20s, but it’s definitely painful now.

Now, there’s very little documentation at all on Blood Tea and Red String. There’s a tiny bit, but it’s usually staged, because I’m like, ‘Show me plopped up here, show me here,’ whereas now documentation is not staged. I might decide which coveralls are the most flattering that day when my friend is there to hold the camera, but it’s definitely not staged. But it’s still a very private, personal space while the documentation is being taken, and my team—my collaborators there, we’re very close.

Her art explores themes of transformation, vulnerability, and the subconscious, often utilizing recurring motifs of birds, delicate puppets, and intricate stitch-work.

When working in 16mm film, it’s about two and a half minutes. I would usually stop because I didn’t want to run out of film in the middle of animating. I joined an ASIFA chapter, the animation association, in San Francisco. At the time I joined, I got my very first roll of film back and I included it in their group screening. They would have these group screenings, and they would have live music for them. So, even way back then, I found ways to be pretty immediate, in mid-to-late 90s terms, showing it fairly soon after I got it developed. And that was really important, because there were mostly animators there. I got a lot of feedback from animators who were really receptive to my work, and it really encouraged me to keep going with the film. So that was good.

But it could take me like a couple of months to shoot two and a half minutes of film. So they were a little stretched out; I’d get two and a half minutes of film and be in that month’s screening, and then in a few months, I’d be invited to the next one with my five minutes of film, and then it was like seven minutes of film. Around that time, I stopped showing up with them, I don’t remember what happened, but then I moved away eventually.

So, I did find ways to share my work. Also, in the early days of the internet, like the 2000s, I would share some of my work on a stop-motion animation website. I got a lot of attention that way, even without social media. Now it would be more immediate if I shared my work more often, but it’s the sharing that kind of feeds me to keep on going. The isolation can sometimes short-circuit my ability to focus if it goes on for too long, but a good week of isolation is great because I’m just like, “I’m going away from this.” I’m an intro and I’m an extroverted introvert, so I’ve got to have a little balance there.

I don’t ever want to go back to film again. Even if I were to have a side-by-side reference, there is just too much chance of loss. I love to see the work as I’m going, because I can make corrections based on what I’m seeing. With Dragonframe, I actually will edit the animation as I’m working on it. I’m like, “Oh, could he pause? Maybe he needs to pause here,” and I can test it. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s great!” If the pause looks too still, then I can go back and shoot a pause with a little bit of blow on there, just to make it seem like there’s a little wind when they’re outside. So, I can’t necessarily just do a copy-paste kind of thing, but that accuracy helps me understand how the scene is going.

So, I don’t want to go back. I love it. It may take me longer to animate, but the outcome is a lot better. But for all those people who love stop-motion for its kind of jerky, very handmade quality, my audience does not need to worry. It is still very much handmade animation. It will not be mistaken for CG, I swear.

She currently shares her decade-spanning expertise with the next generation of creators as an Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she champions the enduring power of experimental narrative and physical craft in a digital age.

Because your films are entirely dialogue-free, the audio track has to carry immense narrative and emotional weight. At what point in your pipeline do you start thinking and hearing the sound of the world and the film you are creating? 

With Blood Tea and Red String, the entire film was done and picture-locked before I entered sound. I started to create a sound for it because I knew that I wanted my oak dwellers to sound like crows. I did my best to kind of make a bit of a neutral enough, hand-held sort of sound so that it could go along with the flute, and I also knew I wanted to have general, natural sounds. So that kind of sustained it to a certain point. But it really came alive once the picture locked and we got the sound started on it. The relationship was very separate for that film.

Whereas with Seed in the Sand, I was about 15 minutes in and I was still looking for someone who could create the nest dwellers’ bird-chirpy sound. I had one person who tried to do it with flutes, and I didn’t liked that very much. Then my friend, Karie Jacobson, wrote to me and said, “Is there anything you need for your film? I love your work. I’d love to be involved in something, to the effect of… if you think my music would fit,” something like that. And I wrote back to her and was like, “What I really need is someone who can actually just chirp like a bird.”

She told me this later, but at the time she was like, “Oh my God, no one knows that my father taught me to chirp like a bird when I was little.” It wasn’t something she had ever done out in public. So she got back to me and said, “Well, in fact, I can chirp like a bird.” At the time, I was getting about $250 a month from Patreon, so I said, “Well, I have no extra money, but I can pay you what I get on Patreon to cover doing the first song,” which was a lullaby song. I was so in love with the song when I got it that we just decided to work together.

Then, when I got the Guggenheim grant in 2019, I was finally able to actually pay her a real wage for her work. We’ve continued to work together and we’ve become close friends. She’s been collaborating on even getting social media help and documentation.

Anyway, so now I work a little more conventionally in that I create the animatics before I start animating. Now, I’ll send her the animatics for scenes that need music, and I’ll get the music before I animate. A lot of times, the music will change what my plan was for the scene. So it’s now kind of a loop, which is really exciting. I think there’s a lot of value in staying true to whatever comes out of your own mind for your artwork, and I try to do that to an extent, but having a collaborator who is so in sync with what I’m doing has really improved my work.

To the point where I have another collaborator. They’re friends, and she actually came because of my other collaborator, Fred Manchento.  They both give really amazing critiques of my work because they understand my project so well. I always resist at first, and they patiently listen to my resistance. It usually takes overnight, and then I’m like, ‘Oh my God, you’re right. I know what to do.’

So I’d say, and here’s advice for people critiquing other people, which I try to remember when I’m critiquing my students, “Try not to give a solution when you’re critiquing, just express that there’s an issue.” Because that’s how it works for me. If they tried to suggest a solution, I’d be like, “No, no, no.” But instead, they’re just like, “You say you’re doing this, but what we see is this. Somehow, this is not being communicated; it’s just going from A to C without B.” I think I prefer that type of collaboration.

You spent around 13 years creating Blood Tea and Red String. How did the person who finished the film differ from the person who started it? 

I became a lot more confident in my abilities, even just for self-advocacy. I started the film right after I graduated with a painting degree from San Francisco Art Institute. I was very much shy, introverted. Well, I’m still anxious. I was just feeling like, ‘I don’t know what I’m making, but I want to make it.’ And I had no real expectations that anyone would really see it beyond just a circle of friends and a few random other outsiders.

But gradually, as I shared my work and became involved with ASIFA, and eventually started a career in animation in Los Angeles when I was just a few years away from being done with the film, my skill level increased, my storytelling ability increased, and my understanding of why some things work better than others grew. I think I ended up a much more capable and confident person.

But I’d say my ability to ramble along comfortably in response to questions—that has come more since teaching, after the film was done. And just being involved in Q&A sessions, being invited, and then forcing myself to get up on a stage, answer questions, and talk to people. That was so hard at the beginning. Really, really hard. It’s teaching, where I’ve said stupid things in front of small groups of people, my students, so many times, where I’m just like, “We’ll recover.” People will nod and laugh, and you recover.

What have you learned about patience that could only be learned through step-by-step stop-motion? 

I wouldn’t have thought of myself as a patient person. People are like, ‘Oh, you must be so patient.’ I’m like, “Well, not over most things.” Actually, I’m quite impatient. But there’s a certain thing when you love something and you know what it takes to make it work correctly: you just find a way to get into the flow, and you imitate patience.

There are some people who recommend you don’t even listen to music when you animate, that you just stay. I’m like, “No, no, I’ve got to shut up part of my brain if I’m going to be able to stay focused.” So, depending on what my mood is, I need either a good podcast or just certain music.

Because I’ll take two or three frames, and if I’m listening to music in a large enough space, I’ll go do a little one-minute dance party. And then I’ll go back, or I’ll wander off for snacks regularly. It’s not like I’m just there focusing for 10 hours without leaving. I have to be very easily distracted, but I just keep at it.

And then, the pleasure of having a completed shot is really powerful. So, I would say it feels so good to have a completed shot, no matter how much pain you’re in at the end. Well, actually, the pain usually comes the next morning, like with any exercise. It’s like starting a new exercise regime.

What happens to your puppets after the animation is complete? Does it feel like retirement, preservation, or something else? 

I’ve tried to preserve the puppets. They still exist. In fact, the show that I had last weekend was the very first time I brought puppets out. My friend at the museum of stop-motion animation had some stands, because the theater didn’t have any of those kinds of things. The stands came with little acrylic covers. I brought the puppets and he helped me, but the props were a different story.

The props from Blood Tea and Red String have been moldering away for 20 years in a shed with an open door on the family farm. We just dug them out just over a week ago. I found that everything made of papier-mâché had been eaten away, but I found chairs and some other things. So, we’re even preserving a few of the props. They all smell like mold, though. If they are ever to be displayed, they probably will always need to be under plexiglass.

But the puppets are in great shape because I’ve always just treasured them and kept them in the house. I’m still in love with them. I don’t want to give them up, they’re still here.

How has your relationship to storytelling changed between Blood Tea and Red String and the new project Seed in the Sand? What aspect do you think will surprise people who know your previous work? 

Well, I’d say with Blood Tea and Red String, most of it was about staying true to my inspiration, and everything followed more dream-logic. My leaning towards conventional storytelling was limited in that piece. I mean, I think in one way it’s a very simple story that goes through, but in another way, it’s like a container for a symbolic transformation—and that was more important than the storyline.

I feel that with Seed in the Sand, that is still very important. So, I stay very true to my inspirations unless or until they change, which they do over the course of a long project as you see new opportunities and have new experiences. But I think now, I have learned a lot more about storytelling, and through teaching people storytelling. The teacher learns along with the students, seeing what people do that works and things that don’t work. I’m not shying away from or rejecting conventional storytelling anymore; I’m willingly applying it where it works, where it doesn’t interrupt the intuitive portions.

So, I think some of the storytelling has become a more intuitive part of me, where it doesn’t feel like a stranger to the project. Certain things are flowing in a way that I don’t think Blood Tea and Red String did. I think that I’ve improved in conveying the story through the emotive animation—just in how the characters interact. I think a lot of that was evident in Blood Tea and Red String, but it’s much more clear now.

Part of that is from just being able to see it as I’m doing it. It’s like, ‘Oh, a one-second pause says a lot,’ and there really aren’t those kinds of pauses in Blood Tea and Red String. Back then, if they were looking around at something, it was like this—[E.N. She mimics a character’s jerky movement from the Blood Tea and Red String project], whereas now it’s like, ‘Look this way.’ [E.N. She demonstrates the smoother, deliberate movement for the current project, Seed in the Sand].

So, I think I’m better at supporting the story with the animation. I’m not sure any of that will be surprising, though, but the two films will definitely feel different. They both come from me. I think there are still people who will kind of pick one or the other as the one they like better, probably depending on the individual.

As an educator, you teach a generation of students who have grown up in a hyper-digital world dominated by Artificial Intelligence. What is the most important lesson you try to teach them about the value of imperfection, mistakes, and physically engaging with their medium? 

In my stop-motion classes, I encourage the students to just do it. If they feel intimidated by the polish of a Laika film, I show them examples where the films are amazing and engaging, but they aren’t perfect. Sometimes they’re better for that lack—or not necessarily better, but the raw and the real quality of it just works.

I encourage them to just do it, even if they see all the flaws in their work; to go ahead and put it in a festival if it’s completed, because a flaw doesn’t make a work unlikable. I point out a few flaws in my own work and say, ‘People still like this film a lot. Other people really do not, and they will be loud about it online, but that’s fine.’

Nowadays, because everything is so expensive, students feel like their education needs to lead directly to a job. They get a little too wrapped up in that. Yes, that’s important; we all need to survive. But while perfection can be trained and can be grown, understanding the emotion behind the animation is more important than starting out perfect. It is challenging to put it into words in one sentence. Also, with this changing landscape, you can’t really teach kids to be prepared for a job that may or may not exist. But what you can teach and encourage is resiliency, dedication, and the importance of focusing on the foundation of your storytelling, your talent, and your ideas. The media may change and the way you get there might change, but if you have this kind of personal dedication, resiliency, and creativity, and you’ve honed it, then I feel confident that it can lead you into whatever the new world is.

Back in the early days of CGI, stop-motion animators were getting hired for those CGI teams because they understood weight; they understood how to manipulate three-dimensional objects. Training them how to do that in the computer program was a lot easier than training someone who knew the program to be able to animate. To broaden this to all animation mediums, just understanding the principles of animation for any kind of animation you’re doing is really important. That way, whatever technology you are presented with, you’ll still know what you need to achieve with the new tools.

Photos courtesy of © Christiane Cegavske

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.