For folks whose athletic finesse (or possibly, their lack of) has yet to land them in the big leagues, watching the FIFA World Cup on television may suffice. But a couple of New York artists wanted more. Former Charlestonian Case Jernigan and Anderson Farriss, two lovers of the beautiful game, are putting their hands to work constructing stop-motion videos of notable World Cup and soccer history highlights, specifically of the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team. “I’ve always been interested in sports as a vehicle for art but couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work for me,” says Jernigan. He says soccer became his inspiration with the start of this year’s World Cup. “Soccer is a wonderful combination of colors, histories, emotions, heroes, and villains. The narratives are rich and varied and make for engaging visuals.”
To create the complex stop-motion videos, Jernigan and Farriss’ handmade pieces are crafted from the simplest of materials (paper, knives, graphite, ink, and glue) and then arranged into scenes. Each scene is then altered frame-by-frame to create a sense of movement. Players, balls, fields, and other elements of the scenes are made from layers of paper with cutouts to create patterns for things like the men’s jerseys. “A jersey with complicated colors and layers might take me several hours to stitch and glue together,” Jernigan tells us. “Typically it takes 15 still photographs to make one second of animation, so it’s quite time consuming. I could work for two days on a scene, but will only come out with a few seconds of video.” Slightly bumping the scene or camera the wrong way means losing track of where you are or throwing the whole thing off. Jernigan says, “You have to be really consistent.”
Learn more about Case and Anderson’s work or Kickstarter project at off-foot.com to support the stop-motion videos.
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