J The first live-action film that had a great effect on me, what I first recognized to be amazing acting, would be Shine (1996) which incidentally is a piano-based story. As a child, I was of course very interested in Disney films like Beauty and the Beast (1991) where I would trace a colouring book behind the couch over a tiny glass table with a lamp underneath(!), and the drunk scene in Dumbo (1941) designed by Dali is still a favourite of mine.

I used to watch a stop-motion version of the Wind in the Willows (1983) at my grandmother’s house almost weekly - her only film for children - which I think really informed my interest in puppetry. I was too young to recognise that puppets were created by artists, I think at that age I believed the mice were real trained animals…and perhaps all weasels spoke with a cockney accent! I still have a childlike interpretation when I rewatch some of the scenes - I feel a senseless dread in the scene where Moley is painting his house and spills the paint. He says “oh bother” followed by a long silence as he tries to clean it, which always terrified me. 

J I also didn’t believe that I could create these types of productions until I was in the last year of high-school, where I created a stop-motion animation using a very arduous method of filming 3 seconds onto tape and then editing down the tape into frames. I also had to colour grade each frame because the footage changed colour every time it recorded! This was before decent digital cameras were available - it was the brief period in technology where mini-DV tapes didn’t have any USB connection to the camera. Afterwards I studied at RMIT University, completing a Bachelor of Media Arts which included animation, video, photography and sound. Then I specialised in animation at Victorian College of the Arts for another 2 years, as part of my Masters degree at Melbourne University.

On Natalie Trayling

M Please tell us a little about how you came across Natalie’s music - did you see her perform live on the streets of Melbourne or find Natalie’s compositions online? And what drew you to Natalie’s music?

J I saw Natalie play 4 or 5 years ago around Swanston Street and Flinders Lane with her electric keyboard. Of course, there’s many buskers around this part of Melbourne but not many that make you and everyone else around you stop instantly in your tracks. I would be texting people ‘quick you have to get down here!’ It was magical to even be able to see her play, let alone how moving her compositions are. Afterwards, I found her on YouTube (on a channel created by her son Matthew) and was totally addicted. There is a clip of her playing the Melbourne Town Hall organ which is just incredible. It seems like the rest of the world know and appreciate her genius, and Australia is just catching up.

J I always thought Natalie’s music would be perfect as the soundtrack to a film. My idea flourished and grew as I realised that I would make a film for one of her songs. I’m so grateful to have her blessing on this project. Her work is complex and emotional, it’s also fully improvised which is amazing. It’s like that form of improvised jazz yet it’s classical. I asked Natalie if she has memorized sequences that she combines in different ways, as a form of improvising, but she said that she didn’t so it's a very pure form and process with each piece.

The Piano (1993) describes it well in one scene where a supporting character, Aunt Morag, describes the main character’s piano skills to her daughter Nessie:

“You know I am thinking of the piano. She does not play the piano as we do Nessie. No she is a strange creature and her playing is strange like a mood that passes into you. You cannot teach that Nessie, one may like to learn but that could not be taught”.

M I had the privilege of speaking with Natalie Trayling about Jody’s film over the phone last month. I didn’t record our conversation, I took notes during and immediately after it - recording what we both said as well as my personal feelings and thoughts to retain as much as possible. We discussed lots of topics, it wasn’t too formal or structured. I’ll be sharing and connecting Natalie’s thoughts with different parts of Jody’s answers.

Natalie (N) reiterated Jody’s comments about her improvisational style when discussing the differences between performing at home and in public. Due to the pandemic, Natalie hasn’t performed in public for the past two years so I was curious to know about its possible impact on her music compositions:

N It doesn’t really make much difference to me, I can compose wherever I am, I compose all the time, I do it as it emerges, I just play you know, everything I play is all new music and expressions like Jody’s art, it’s never quite the same.

M But she did mention the joy of performing in public:

N It’s in the title, because that’s where I want to be (performing), among the people…and when I’m busking, I’m not worried about donations or anything like that, I just play.

On Music Medicine & Synesthesia

M Music medicine and synesthesia are very interesting areas and concepts to explore on screen. Have you always been interested in these areas or did the combination of Natalie’s music and the pandemic specifically inspire you to study and develop these ideas on screen?    

J I’ve been interested in the idea of creating relaxing scenes since I realised many people I knew suffered from anxiety. I thought creating meditative pieces could be useful as so much content now is highly edited with so much speed. I guess this idea simmered away in the background over many years without much results. When the pandemic started, ASMR videos started appearing and I had an online exhibition called ‘Paradise Together Forever 2020’ that focused solely on digital animated GIFs designed to be relaxing and uplifting.

The GIFs are halfway between still/animated pieces which are made up of 16x16 pixel animated blocks, and are viewable on my website under ‘Gixel Pifs’. I pitched the project to the City of Melbourne Arts grants program and at the beginning I had some ideas of organic coloured digital seascapes and other natural interpretations. But as the Melbourne lockdowns extended and the laws became more prohibitive, my work became increasingly high colour/uplifting. You can really see the difference between the first work and the eighth!

J This film follows the same theme, using abstraction and other references from that original exhibition such as the colour palette and objects of meditation. Some feedback for this exhibition was that it is ‘deceptively simple’ which I agree with and would also apply to this film. During the opening week, I had a message board on the exhibition page and some of my favourite (and most generous!) were:

- ‘If a dial-up modem could dream... I'd imagine it'd look a lot like this’

- ‘Some bits were like watching the element of an old heater start to glow’

- ‘Feel like my brain has had a bath. Clever and beautiful and mysterious’

- ‘Calming on a chaotic day, like watching the stars’

M I can partly see why Jody would also apply ‘deceptively simple’ to this film - the concept may be relatively simple however the work involved and final result are quite intricate. Overall, I think Jody’s film is deep and simple - the more you watch it, the more nuances you pick up and see. During our conversation, Natalie (N) highlighted the depth and subtlety of Jody’s film, effectively saying:    

N Jody’s an observer of everything, she’s very herself (implying that Jody has an original style), she’s quick on the uptake you know what I mean, like an architect, when she mentioned that she was making it (the film), I said okay and then she actually went into exactly as I did it (Jody matching the improvisational aspects of her composition).

I love the art of it, she’s got a lot of colours really making emotions, like it’s really its own art-form, every time you look at it, you see something else which I love.

On Watercolours

M I love your choice of painting with watercolours - their softness and translucence suit the nature of your project in many ways. The way watercolours flow and move freely kind of matches the improvisational aspect of Natalie’s composition. Please tell us a little about choosing watercolours as the method and pathway of exploring music medicine and synesthesia on screen?    

J I studied real watercolour in a botanical workshop with Mali Moir in Melbourne. When I discovered these new digital brushes, they had such a soft realistic effect, so much better than anything before so I knew I had to use them in something. Opacity and the random texture of the frame by frame method is visually appealing to me. It took many efforts to figure out the best workflow for using the brushes, and the overall way to build the film. I tried to make an extensive library of different shapes and different dot lengths, all ordered by frame length to match the notes. I would recolour in post-production but it just didn’t work - it looked flat and lifeless, even though it was frame by frame. And I also tried the watercolour brushes on a video layer in Photoshop but they gave a strange pixelated edge to the brushes once composited which didn’t look organic enough.

J I wasted so much time to find a quicker way of working, but in the end I improvised and coloured frame by frame, and to be honest, when the music got more and more complex it was intimidating. Natalie doesn’t really play for less than 6 minutes, so at 6:30 I was stretched and asking myself, ‘will this be enough to hold everyone’s attention?’ and ‘is it too much or too less?’ The opacity and speed worked well and I eventually realised that having less on screen was more appealing because as it becomes more complex, you’re focused more on the music. So the visuals are an accompaniment to the music rather than the other way around.

‘I’ve been interested in the idea of creating relaxing scenes since I realised many people I knew suffered from anxiety’

— Jody Cleaver

On The Future

M What are you planning to make next?

J I’m developing the digital watercolours I used in this project into a series of multi-layered landscapes, and then adapting them into a VR environment with a soundtrack so it’s more immersive and meditative. And I’m doing a series of animation workshops at Frontyard Youth Services in Melbourne, to create drawn characters into mini-documentaries, which gives so much freedom in storytelling. Another project I’m considering ties in with some research I did at the state archives in Sydney about my 3rd great grandmother. She lived during the 1860s and died mysteriously young. I’ve solved some of the mystery and I might make an animated documentary about her story.

Mark’s Final Thoughts

• This is honestly one of my favourite interviews, it's filled with so many wonderful insights and takeaways! Thank you again to Jody and Matthew for giving me the opportunity to interview Natalie Trayling.

• I don’t know much about Georges Schwizgebel, Simone Massi and Yuri Norstein so I’m excited to research and catch up with their work. I am familiar with acclaimed Australian filmmaker Sarah Watt because I watched and studied her film Look Both Ways (2005) during high school. It’s a live-action film that incorporates lovely animation and visual effects to explore complex themes of death and tragedy in an unconventional way.

• The Piano (1993) is very formative and influential to my understanding of film and its relationship to music. So it was awesome to see Jody reference The Piano in describing the nature and talent of Natalie. 

• Lastly, click here to watch a short documentary about Natalie’s unique life story and passion for music.

  Tags Animation Colour Experimental Mental Health

Want to Learn More? Click here for insight into how classic ‘colour-music’ and ‘colour-medicine’ theories guided Jody’s process of crafting the film’s colour palette.

The founder of Hommage, Mark Shaba published this interview on 13.08.2022. Mark is a filmmaker from Victoria, Australia. He respectfully acknowledges the past and present traditional owners of the land on which he creates, promotes and screens art, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation who are the custodians.