Help Desk is a three minute animated short by Edwin Rostron. The animation is made of simple black lines on a blue backdrop, with varied of patterns of circles, triangles and squares set inside a grid. The designs frequently play with suggestions of 3D space: objects move towards or away from the viewer, or pass behind or in front of other objects. Most designs are contained within a square frame, so there is also a theme of “windows” which open and close to reveal new patterns. The electronic music, by William Goddard (aka Supreme Vagabond Craftsman), plays with echoes and loops, which pairs well with the repetitions within the grids.
Very broadly, the film belongs to a ubiquitous category of animated films which one can think of as “films about a surprising series of transformations.” These films take advantage of animation’s infinitely plastic ability to create new worlds, and keep us entertained with their surprising morphs and shifts.
But Rostron is doing something much more specific than that: by limiting his pallet to simple geometric forms, he is drawing our attention down into a highly organic, intuitive method of spontaneously developing visual ideas. He looks into each one of his hand-drawn cells and allows the next idea to grow out of it, like a seed germinating and growing into a plant. This process of organic development is a big part of the surprising-yet-inevitable aesthetic that humans find pleasing in moving images, since the ideas grow in a similar way to the natural world around us.
The pleasure of watching the natural flow of this development is made possible by Rostron’s trust in the process, and his finely-tuned sense of form. The pleasure does have its limits: it continually stimulates a particular layer of our visual attention, but everything stays on one level of engagement throughout. The film excels at organically growing form, but it never deepens, doesn’t try to add new levels of emotional, aesthetic, or intellectual engagement.
In other words, the film does one specific thing and does it exceedingly well. As such, it captivates us for a certain length of time. Fortunately, Rostron’s sensitivity to the organic duration of the film is as fine-tuned as his sense of form, and he limits the piece to a length that feels ideal and satisfying.
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