The Quay Brothers

The Quay brothers are influencial stop-motion animators, film makers and directors, these brothers were born on the 17th June 1947 and are both identical twins. The Quay brothers both studied at the Philadelphia College of Art wherer theru studied illustration and graphics they both graduated in 1969. After graduating from college they won a scolarship at the Royal College of Art in London. In the 1970's the Quay brothers had a steady output of there own projects which were surreal and a very good attention to detail, however to help fund there own projects they had worked on TV commericals, and numerous music videos etc examples of compaines that they have worked or are Nikon, Coca-Cola etc and for music they had workd on the song Sledge Hammer (1986) which became number in the UK charts and went to number one in the US.


As of today the two brothers Stephen Quay and Timothy Quay are both professors of animated film at the European Graduate School.

Why is the piece of work good?

With there style of animation I can heavily compare it to the animatior Jan Svankmajer, however from thinking that there influence came from Jan Svankmajer, when we watched part of the documentary in class teh Quay brothers never even heard of him, however now the Quay brothers are great admirers of Jan Svankmajer and had dedicated a short film to him which was called The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984). Most of there work was very dark, moody, bizarre and sinister which had spread across the atmosphere of the animations, one part of the animtion which is key to the Quay brothes is the music, "music is the bloodstream and like any choreographer we compose our visual narrative through music--it almost co-writes the scenario. We'd like to achieve a musicalization of space, and would prefer our work to follow musical law rather than a dramaturgical one."

Explantion of one the pieces?

What you would ecpect to see in such animations frm the Quay brothers are:

• Cobwebs
• Dust
• Strange machinary
• A world that hasn't been touch in decades
• Colours scheme looks like old photographs such as sepias, browns and dirty yellows
• Strange animated objects

How has it been done technically?

From one of my references I discovered that one of the restrictions of their life was the course had done in Philadelphia and the Quay brothers were fustrated with their still images of illustration and graphics, the lack of sound and music, so they decided to do some 2D cut-out shorts but were still fustrated and wanted the third dimension.

In the animation world the Quay brothers are known because of their craftsmen methods and their uncommon sources of inspiration and here is a quote where some of there animation comes from,"our animation draws heavily on a very sophisticated visual language--a certain quality of lighting and decor, of stylized movement--which has a lot to do with Expressionism. But at the same time one could talk Keaton, or early Swedish or Danish cinema, all of which are crucial for us. The essential influence is that of a visual aesthetic which doesn't rely upon dialogue." From there ispiration they had created puppets that looked like dolls, these dolls look very worn out and then took apart to make something totally different. As a two man team they constructed their own sets, they had arranged the lighting and also operated the cameras.

Reference
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/498256/
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/stephen-timothy-quay/biography
http://old.thing.net/ttreview/febrev.02.html