Animation
Wooden Nickels
An animated music video for Dan Munkus’ Wooden Nickels from his album The Edge of the High Trace.
A Once Lonely Man
An animated music video for Dan Munkus’ A Once Lonely Man from his album The Edge of the High Trace.
Eighty-Four Today
An animated music video for Dan Munkus’ Eighty-Four Today from his album The Edge of the High Trace.
The End of the High Trace
An animated music video for Dan Munkus’ The End of the High Trace from his album The Edge of the High Trace.
Soldier Online
A sound-reactive animated music video for the band Old Robes (Daniel Munkus, Heather Sommerlad, and Rachel Epp) from their album The Spider and the Spectator on Subtle Soup Records.
Winner, Best Animation
Feedback Experimental Film Festival, Toronto, Canada; 1/2020
Official Selection
Istanbul Experimental Film Festival, Istanbul, Turkey; 11/2019
Experimental Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico; 10/2019, 6/2023
EXS Festival, Novi Sad, Serbia; 8/2019
UNDER_the_RADAR_2019, Vienna, Austria; 6/2019
NCCC Film & Animation Festival, Sanborn, NY; 5/2019
Bogotá Experimental Film Festival / Cineautopsia v.5, Bogotá, Colombia; 2019
Who is the Soldier Online? A gamer, lost in their own exciting but unreal world? A drone pilot, far removed from the too-real destruction they are causing? A troll, wielding heavy words at a distance? Just a persistent brute, pushing forward despite desperate odds? Or perhaps, quite literally, a dog in heat? (On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog…) It’s this mystery character that I animated, always running, but always fragmenting and re-forming, in a world alternately collapsing and exploding around them. The animation is generative and audio-responsive, meaning that it is not “edited” in a conventional, linear way: rather it is a piece of software that responds to the changes in the music to create an evolving visual narrative. Although you are seeing one recording of the video, in its native form it turns out differently each time it is played, influencing the narrative implications. The look of the piece takes its playful inspiration from motifs in 17th-century Chinese classical painting.