Lose Your Mind in an Experimental "Layerlapse" Animation

Eyes, ears, fingers, and noses stagger across the canvas of illustrator Jake Fried's latest layerlapse animation, Mind Frame. More than just a drawing timelapse, Fried’s experimental animations fall somewhere in-between collage and painting. The artist constructs each animation on one piece of high-grade paper that he repeatedly scans as he adds layers upon layers of ink, white out, and coffee.

In previous works like Night Vision, for example, Fried says he was mostly concerned with abstraction, pattern, and rhythm. With Mind Frame, he focused instead on removing “overt symbolism and iconography” in order to concentrate on what he calls the “flesh—human experience and expression.” Out of the nine months he spent working on Mind Frame, the artist spent the majority of his time drawing and redrawing facial features and hands, “distorting aspects of space vs time, the self vs. past-selves and others,” he tells The Creators Project. All of his work involves portraiture in some way, but Mind Frame makes a concerted effort to sustain a close up on each of the different emerging figures.

For the last five years, the Boston-based artist has been making these minute-long animation videos with increasing degrees of intricacy. Fried says he starts each piece with a general idea of what he wants to explore, but allows himself room to discover the piece along the way: “I discover the work as much as I make it, there is mystery in the work for me as well.” Check out Mind Frame below:

Mind Frame from Jake Fried on Vimeo.

For more work by the artist head over his website.

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