Miracle Fortress – Have You Seen In Your Dreams? (Montreal, 2008)
Music video.
Written, Directed, Animated and Edited. Total Approx: 3 minutes.
Produced by Patricia Boushel.
Vienna Pitts / Patricia Boushel Production for Secret City Records.


How did you make it? After story-boarding the shots, I got my youngest cousins to act it out in a live action version of the music video. I edited that footage to the music as though it was the video itself. This video was then projected onto the stage of four MagnaDoodles, traced then photographed with a still camera on a fixed and marked tripod.

One unexpectedly long step of each drawing was turning on and off two Kino flow lights for each frame from a central eight button switch (one for each bulb). The animation is only ten drawings per second, I would advance the video three frames for each drawing since the original live action footage was shot at 30 fps. After each drawing I would erase MagnaDoodle board, losing them forever. I was really interested in that ephemeral aspect of the animation, I drew roughly 1,850 frames that would exist for a few minutes and then dissapear permanently with each swipe of the eraser. I animated the video over three weeks in a small rented room of an apartment on Rue Bernard in the dead of winter, all while going to school full time and working a part time job. I recently donated the boards to a second hand toy center.

The Magna Doodle was produced by Tyco until 1998 when most of Tyco’s toys were sold to Fisher-Price. The Magna Doodle is currently produced by the Ohio Art Company and used to be distributed in the United Kingdom by Fisher-Price. Fisher-Price have discontinued the Magna Doodle and have produced their own alternative called the Doodle Pro. The Doodle Pro is still available in the UK from the distribution company Megatel LTD. (Wikipedia.org)