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♪

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Kind of a nice thing...

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[Experiment #001--Lips]

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My name is Tommy Hartung. I make movies.

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[Tommy Hartung--Artist]

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And I live and work in Ridgewood, Queens.

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New York Close Up

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["Tommy Hartung's Underground Movies"]

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I just moved into a new space this past summer.

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And I’ve really just been you know sitting in the space and thinking about what...what kind of space do I want to work in?

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♪

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I was talking to one of my friends and he called it an arena, the studio as like some kind of arena.

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And I really like that, as a sort of like this place where I’m just you know making a play as I’m making it, you know? And writing it.

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♪

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This is just raw footage. The storm. And then this is just a ball of plastic wrap maybe around the size of my hand.

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And this is just a...or, the clouds made out of battening, the stuff you stuff pillows with.

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[Experiment #002--Salt]

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Cue the salt.

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But you know a little...a lot of my planning is just sort of like these kind of experiments and like you know figuring out what the time and the sort of structure is.

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I use the...the filmmaking process to document this, you know me acting out these different ideas on objects or you know these little setups or maquettes or dioramas.

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[Experiment #003--Frog]

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NARRATOR: I would like to be able to tell you of transformation and change to cut deeply into the structure.

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But this here now is (INAUDIBLE). We have to touch.

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HARTUNG: I sort of latch on to some kind of external theme, you know. And then I just sort of use that as a structure conceptually and then whatever kind of set or theater that I create in my studio is like the sort of physical space for that idea.

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♪

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When we see something you know move, we want to think of it as maybe something is alive but in my movies it’s just typically not the case.

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♪

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I’m more interested in like some kind of dead cinema.

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["The Story of Edward Holmes" (2008)]

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A lot of animation is describing some kind of real or lifelike situation.

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I’m sort of interested more in my characters or any humanesque subjects in the movie. I’m more interested in them being not believable.

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And what kind of illusion can you create out of that?

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[YELLING]

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[Experiment #004--Doll]

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A lot of the times I just sort of like to move just to touch it all over, just to figure out how I want it to move.

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♪

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But I generally like keeping objects open for a lot of different kinds of interpretations.

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And I’m just sort of interested in like how little we...do we need in a moving image to tell a story.

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♪

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Okay, so “Karo Ronnie’s Face” take one. Right. That’s how you guys do it?

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We got the Karo....I wonder how much is left?

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Yeah, there’s a little bit left. Just a little bit. I don’t want to mess with this paint job up on that too much.