“A Thousand Cuts” is a piece that sifts in this residue of total void, parading the scapes of a bouldered panorama illuminated by rising sun. Anatomizing the notion of loss, it is about leaning into the emptiness of the moment when your world crumbles, accepting it, and through this becoming transformed. Moments unearth deliberately, a thoughtful unshackling and acceptance mustered from the furrows, juts, edges of the chasm. The human rebuttal to the complexities of nihility are poetically illustrated, tearing into an emotional experience expressed through sound and scenery.
Unusually for a film like this, the music was composed first, with the animation following, allowing the shape of the music to dictate the visual. The music is written for string quartet and electronics, blurring the boundaries between the analog and the digital, and this interplay is reflected in the approach to the animation, perfectly capturing the feeling of familiarity with the real world, but with a layer of augmented reality sitting above it.
“A Thousand Cuts” is a collaboration between composer Nicholas Robert Thayer and animator Brandon Bolmer, and is the first film to be released as part of the Three Reflections project, a trio of film pieces with composers Setareh Nafisi and Thijs de Vlieger, and film makers Sam Asaert and Lex Vesseur. Nicholas and Brandon met in 2012, and have worked together in small ways since. This is their first major collaborative project where working in tandem has illustrated their poetic synergies.
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