Jason Sondhi
What’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine? For a time in multi-disciplinary artist Lizzie Oxby’s life, the answer to the question was “Hearing your own voice coming back to you”.
Extn.21 dramatizes that simple circumstance in a grim dystopic fantasy, as Oxby creates a vividly nightmarish post-industrial world of impersonal technology and disconcerting surreality. A masterpiece of design and execution, the short also was a trailblazer for its time—effectively compositing live-action footage of its actor (Richard Leaf) onto S16mm stop-motion animation in a remarkably seamless way that still holds up nearly 15 years later. Winner of the British Animation Award, and a mainstay on European TV in the 2000’s, we’re happy to have Extn.21 as the newest addition to our Classics collection.
Oxby’s film is more concerned with atmospherics than narrative, thus the film is a bit disorienting. Those looking for a straightforward plot progression will be disappointed, yet considered viewing can unlock a visceral reaction to the main character’s angst, and key twists throughout change our underlying understanding of the world. While Oxby’s explicit messaging doesn’t venture far past the nightmare of its main character’s peculiar predicament, the world itself is rich for interpretations. The plethora of screens mediating the action, paired with the dilapidated analog technologies displayed, summon up visions of totalitarian surveillance states. The main character’s preoccupation with photocopies—he has them, does he have them, did he send them?—when paired with the unyielding grayness of the world, suggests a sort of capitalist critique, which dovetails nicely with the central premise of a man, listened to, but never heard.
The star of the show is Oxby’s animation though. One of the big weaknesses of stop-motion animation for storytelling is that they lack facial variety, which is incredibly important for allowing connections between characters and audiences. Think Disney films—their facial animation are wild and overly exaggerated, yet most models or puppets in stop-motion are blandly stoic. Laika needed to develop a unique 3D printing solution to its stop-motion workflow to overcome this facial animation issue. Oxby, with the help of her compositor, John Taylor, shot her actor on DigiBeta against a blue screen, and then attached the head to a puppet body. It is really quite genius, and allows for the meticulous set design and world-building Oxby is able to create through models, without compromising an engaging lead performance from a talented actor. You can check out a 3min making-of clip here.
Oxby reached out to us recently, because, after many years, she has a feature film project that will be incorporating many of the technological and design elements originated in Extn.21. The project is still a bit hush hush, but recently won a John Brabourne Award (alongside S/W alums Bill Lumby and Jed Hart) which is prestigious financial and mentorship grant in the UK given out by the Cinema and Television Benevloent Fund. Oxby has been one of the most inventive artists playing inbetween the boundaries of animation and live-action and we’re excited by the prospect of seeing her unique creativity sketched out on a bigger canvas!