‘Glimpses’ Is An Abstract Postcard Of Places Both Real And Imagined

Emanuele Kabu’s new animated experiment Glimpses holds a viewer’s attention despite being not only dialogueless, but also soundless.

The one-minute piece creates its own surreal landscape through a variety of minimalist biomorphic shapes that interact with a straight line in the middle of the screen. Each of the shapes leaves behind a trail of ghostly dithered dots and lines.

Kabu, who is based in in Belluno, Italy, tells Cartoon Brew that the idea for the project was to create an “animated postcard of the places I’ve been, or where I dreamed of being during the production period.” He made it in between commissioned projects.

He calls the process “digital on paper” which leads to the obvious question, How does one work digitally on paper. Kabu explained:

The animation was entirely hand drawn on Adobe Animate, frame by frame, and then edited in After Effects. When I had the final edit I printed all the frames on a cheap laser printer. Since I didn’t want to waste a lot of paper, I down-scaled each frame a lot until I was able to print all 720 frames on 29 A4 sheets. I then scanned everything at high DPI to get a decent resolution. Since the frames were printed very small, a lot of detail was lost, but the animation has acquired that grain and glitches that I love.