Fast Film

"Fast Film" is an animated homage to motion pictures, hand-made by folding 65,000 print outs of film frames into three dimensional objects.

A woman is abducted and a man comes to her rescue, but during their escape they find themselves in the enemy’s secret headquarters. This classic plot conceals an hommage to action movies. In 14 minutes, Fast Film (a play on words, English fast and German fast, meaning “almost”) provides a tour de force through film history, from its silent beginnings to present-day Hollywood. The filmmakers printed out some 65,000 individual images from 300 films, folded them into paper objects, arranged them in complex tableaux, and then brought them to life with an animation camera in a two-year production process.

Peter Tscherkassky on Fast Film

A kiss, a happy couple. But then, the woman is kidnapped, and the man sets off to save her. A dramatic rescue story full of wild chase scenes begins. The audience is taken to the center of the Earth and the enemy’s headquarters. On its surface, Fast Film tells a simple story. The catch is that all its scenes were taken from 300 different works produced in the course of film history, and the heroes change identities an equal number of times. But as in Virgil Widrich’s Copy Shop (2001), the extraordinary technology used during production is the first thing that stands out about Fast Film. No less than 65,000 paper printouts of individual images were employed. After being folded into thousands of objects such as planes and train cars and arranged in complex tableaux, they were photographed with a simple digital camera and loaded into a computer image by image. At least three different images, the background, the foreground image and an intermediate zone, were used to make up each frame. In certain sequences, this increases to 30 visual layers. The fast and furious story of Fast Film unfolds on the surfaces of the paper objects. Its twists and turns are so well thought-out that additional details can be found in each viewing. What was initially intended to be an homage to action movies breaks new ground in the genre because of its extreme density. This tour de force through film history, from its silent beginnings to present-day Hollywood, lasts just 14 minutes: truly a fast film which could hardly be more furious. (Peter Tscherkassky)

Filme realizado por Virgil Widrich
Data de lançamento 1 de maio de 2003 (Áustria)
Diretor Virgil Widrich
Produtora Amour Fou Vienna
Produção Virgil Widrich, Bady Minck, MAIS
Roteiro Virgil Widrich
Cinematografia Martin Putz
Edição Virgil Widrich