Ondřej Švadlena who is in the process of finishing his new short film Jezdec času / Time rodent in his Paris studio reveals:
“After I finished school, I started working with animation mostly at night. I worked during the day and spent the evenings at home animating. Meanwhile the sun had long since set. I had always been drawn to the poetics of the night, it was part of the atmosphere of my work. Besides, at night you gain a different perspective, you get new ideas.
In the film Jezdec času / Time rodent I attempted to imagine a distant future. I want to tell the story of a world in which people gradually stop differentiating between night and day. Considering our present lifestyle of absolute wastage we are not capable of realising, that without energy, we face catastrophe. And just imagine what would happen to Earth without sunlight. Will mankind find a new energy source? How will we minimize our energy consumption? When you look at the bigger picture, life on Earth is just a tiny, random episode existing alongside the constant creation and dissolution of entire universes. However, I wanted to, somewhat romantically and with a bit of humour, imagine how life might look like under the constant threat of an energy crisis, whether perhaps mankind evolves in some way.
I call this grotesque animated film documentary since its goal is to capture the futuristic face of the Earth not ten, twenty or thirty years in the future but hundreds, thousands, even millions of years later (using a generalized story and 3D computer animation with a simulated timelapse). It will probably be a dystopian, apocalyptic future, but I’m also interested in another aspect.
The film isn’t just supposed to moralise, it’s more intended to show the grotesque nature of mankind, blindly steaming ahead, fueled by a self-destructive force driving it from one catastrophe to another, which, on the other hand, enables it to develop and progress further. It shows how we have to adapt to an enviroment that is gradually changing and being destroyed. I’m trying to give shape to something that most of us don’t even dare imagine. How would we continue to live after the end of the world? Is it possible to survive even after the sun cools down? Can humans exist without their bodies? Where lies the border of life? Will we be able to transfer our consciousness into some kind of electronic form? All these questions excite me and I would very much like to pose them using artistic hyperbole and let the audience find the answers themselves.“
