The Amazing Mr. Bickford

[ Frank Zappa / Bruce Bickford ] + [ Gestalt OrchestrA ]

Zappa released this video "The Amazing Mister Bickford" in 1987, which was entirely composed of 1978 Bickford animations set to a soundtrack of Zappa's orchestral music. This version use the music of Gestalt OrchestrA from Canku Wakan free album. http://archive.org/details/CankuWakan instead of the original soundtrack.

Bruce Bickford (born Seattle, 1947) is a maker of animated films who works primarily in clay animation. From 1974 to 1980 he collaborated with Frank Zappa. Bickford's animation was featured extensively in the Frank Zappa videos Baby Snakes and The Dub Room Special.

Bickford's animations depict surreal scenes based on his unique worldview. Often outwardly seeming to be somewhat disconnected from the world around him, Bruce Bickford's work is extremely subjective in its content and concepts, making for some disturbing and shocking imagery. Much of his video work depicted fast-moving, fluid-like transformations of human figures and disfigured faces into odd beasts on surreal structural settings with impressive camera effects (moving around within his stop-motion animation).
The narrative is not explicit and use a lot the symbolic language.

Trivia : This movie shows the first use of the "bullet time" effect in clay animation (a technique of several cameras taking pictures in the same time around somebody)

Thanks so much to Bruce Bickford http://www.brucebickford.com/