From the Film Maker

I was drawn to the figure in the painting: a boy with a sense of loneliness, yet who also exudes an underlying quirkiness shown through his almost self-satisfied smile. This gave me the idea to create an animation reflecting these two moods, beginning with a sense of sadness and then working its way to a joyful crescendo at the end. It is a reflection of the frailty of human emotions as portrayed in Chardin’s ‘House of Cards’.
Stylistically, I tried to incorporate Chardin’s method of painting his subjects from a distance, then moving nearer to reflect the changing emotions of the subject. For the animation, I used traditional 2D drawing techniques in Flash to create a slow, almost melancholy pace to this animation.

Stephanus Pretorius

A piece inspired by Jean-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, about 1736-7