1000 Bills – An Interesting Animated Film by Alex Itin

1000 Bills is an incredible piece of animation by Alex Itin, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York.

The imagery in the animation is both manic as well as fantastic in nature. The hyper-kinetic visuals consists of a series of hand-drawn human faces loading in quick succession,  with the artist voicing his thoughts over the meaning of art and its troubled, illicit relationship with money.

Visiting the artist’s site gave me more insight about his process.

A snip from his site:

Life, however, is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, said the poet and my plans were interrupted by father’s battle with cancer and subsequent death. I’m sure there is a whole Freudian thing here, but some how the trauma of watching him die seemed to strip me of my ability to make a good picture. I forgot it all. It’s a long story, but I began to try to re-educate my hand and eye in the most basic and infantile (and cheapest) manner I could think of. I started ripping up books and drawing in the pages (it had been a warm-up exorcize I did in College). The only rule was that it had to be a book that I’d read and that I’d loved. There seemed no point in destroying something you were ambivalent about. I did thousands of drawings….most were terrible, but I began to find a new language of linked images.

Watch 1000 Bills (In Imago Speramus) from Alex Itin on Vimeo.