Cinema Pacific is proud to host a special “live cinema” event featuring Jeremy Rourke, a self-taught animator and musician from San Francisco. Using paper, paint, shadows, wood, old photographs, pencils, leaves and sticks to make his animations, Rourke accompanies his films live with guitar and vocals at film festivals and clubs around the country. Rourke has also released two CD’s of his music, Rain in the Woods Out Back and It’s Strange the Things That Happen to Your Friends. In 2010, he was named “best new animator/musician” by SF Weekly.
It’s not unusual to see a striped horse galloping across a sky of cumulus clouds or witness a Victorian-era woman twirling a guitar to catch the eye of her gentleman caller. Each video is a mini-work of pure beauty that has been painstakingly prepared in Rourke’s tiny, unlit studio in the Upper Haight. Every ten seconds of animation takes around four hours to create and each full-length video can take over 50 hours to produce, a fact to which the artist responds, “time is meant to be used, right?”
Rourke appears to be a jack of all trades. He picked up the guitar and strummed a few chords after hearing his brother’s friend play – this experiment led to performances at open mic nights and then bookings at such venues as Viracocha, The Makeout Room and Café Du Nord (even though he’s never been able to read music). He picked up stenciling after being inspired by a stop-motion performance of Laura Goldhamer and the Dovekins – this inspired Jeremy to explore the world of animation, a venture that resulted in him being named SF Weekly’s Animator of the Year in 2010, just two years after breaking into the field.
Rourke will perform live and present his animations at the Bijou on Friday, April 19 at 9:15 p.m.
Advance tickets available here.