The star of this movie is the screen.
Whidbey Island artist and director Drew Christie heads this week to the Sundance Film Festival to screen “The Emperor of Time,” a short film that features a 5-by-5-inch device called a mutoscope.
“The whole movie takes place in that little box,” said Christie, 31. “It’s essentially a little flip-book machine.”
With the twist of a small handle, the mutoscope blends a series of individual images into a motion picture. The 19th-century apparatus was invented for an audience of one.
“The Emperor of Time” is Christie’s third film accepted into Sundance. It’s his first to feature live action instead of animation, but it’s not without an animator’s tricks.
Here’s how the movie was made: The six-minute script was shot outdoors with a single actor and a crew of two. Inside his home studio, Christie filmed a stationary shot of his own hand cranking the mutoscope. Then, he digitally inserted the first footage into the center of the mutoscope in the second footage.
The effect is that viewers see the film like they would have in the early days of cinema.
It’s more than a gimmick: The film is about Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century photographer who accidentally invented filmmaking. After taking pictures of a horse with multiple cameras, Muybridge realized that by stringing the images together he could create the illusion of movement.
“No one had ever been able to see motion that quickly before,“ said Christie, who produces videos for outlets like The New York Times and Vanity Fair. “He essentially gave people motion pictures.”
Muybridge’s filmmaking feats are only part of the plot. “He’s also just a strange character,” Christie said. “I like strange characters.”
Born in England in 1830, Muybridge ditched his birth name, Edward Muggeridge, for the obscure alternative Eadweard Muybridge. He married a younger woman, and when he found out she had been unfaithful, he dropped their son off at an orphanage and killed her lover. The jury ignored Muybridge’s plea of insanity, but still chose to free him because they felt the victim had gotten what he deserved.
With elements of murder and betrayal and images of horses, trains and revolvers, “The Emperor of Time” feels a bit like a Western. That’s why it stars Richard Evans, 81, a retired actor who lives on Whidbey. Besides looking like Muybridge — white beard, weathered face, solemn eyes — Christie liked Evans for the role because he’d acted in shows like “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.”
Evans liked Christie because the young artist reminded him of himself.
“I feel I have a lot in common with him, and there’s like a 50-year age difference,” Evans said. “I walked into his little editing room, and there’s records in there like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, who I knew when we were both young. There’s all these little things around, and I’m thinking, ‘What has this guy done — has he researched me? How could he know these things?’”
Christie has spent years pillaging the past to mold his eclectic taste. Growing up in Issaquah, he frequented multiple libraries to study avant-garde animators, experimental architects and Eastern-European film. At the same time, he collected folk music from America and around the world.
He was a “glutton with information,” he admitted, but never too highbrow for the mainstream. He adored “Star Wars” as a kid, often staging stop-motion movies with toys from the series. Meanwhile, his father taught him to draw, and in high school he mixed film and art and discovered he had a knack for animation.
A build-your-own degree program at The Evergreen State College let him study Russian animation, political economy and performance. After graduating, he survived off odd jobs, animating films in his free time.
“I just kept moving forward. I just focused on the next project and didn’t think any further than that,” he said. “There’s a saying, ‘If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.’”
Eventually he built a client list and quit his day job. That also meant more time to piece together personal projects. He studied Muybridge over the years, kicking around the idea for a film as early as 2010.
Production for “The Emperor of Time” began last January and wrapped in July. Filming locations included Christie’s property in Langley, Ebey’s Landing near Coupeville and a local cemetery. Some scenes were shot with the help, and horses, of Clinton-based sculptor Georgia Gerber.
The film is narrated by Hugh Ross, whose voice has steered projects like the 2007 Brad Pitt film “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” Ross voices Florado, the son Muybridge abandoned. His father, he says as the film opens, was “an emperor of time … the first man who stared at time itself and said, ‘Stop.’”
Los Angeles composer Spencer Thun put the bells and train whistles on the soundtrack. Thun scored Christie’s other two Sundance films, the first of which was the 2012 animated piece “Song of the Spindle.” That film caught the attention of festival founder Robert Redford, who later told Christie he enjoyed the piece and had screened it for Sundance staff.
“Song of the Spindle” also got Christie noticed by The New York Times, which hired him for animation projects. That platform introduced other future clients to his offbeat style, and he’s since hired a full-time employee to keep up.
His work for The Times isn’t straightforward animation. He makes “op-docs” that run in the opinion section, taking on issues like gun control and drones.
Christie has always been drawn to doodling about such real-world issues. “I don’t even like to do something if I don’t think someone will learn something from it,” he said.
There’s more biographical work in the pipeline, including an animated series about musicians from American history (the first episode, which tells of Texas blues guitarist Blind Willy Johnson, is narrated by musician T Bone Burnett).
Another potential project would explore the lives of natural philosophers, those great thinkers who were not just scientists but also mathematicians and ethicists and political theorists. Their approach to the world seems to have inspired Christie: The animator-illustrator-filmmaker also does woodwork in a backyard shed; and he plays the guitar, the banjo and the mandolin. And the piano, and the fiddle.
“He’s the most prolific artist I’ve ever encountered,” said his wife, Amanda Christie. “He’s always thinking about projects, all the time. He’s always working. Although it’s fun for him, so it’s not technically ‘working’.”
The prospect of pursuing not just one path but every path can freeze an artist into inaction. For Christie, it’s what propels him from one project to the next, five or six of them at a time, his hand always scribbling, strumming, spinning.
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