Breaking Bread with Veronica Choulga
Sliced Bread Staff Writer Shiloh Miller Meets with Veronica Choulga to Discuss Animation, Surrealism, and Future Films
Instagram: @veronicachoulga
Sliced Bread (S.B.): Hi Veronica, tell us a little bit about yourself!
V.C.: I'm a third year, I live in Boston, my family is Ukrainian and Russian. I’m triple majoring in economics, art history, and cinema. I have a cat named after Liza Minnelli.
S.B.: How did you come to do the kind of art that you do?
V.C.: I liked drawing when I was little, and then my parents put me through some courses so I could get taught in the traditional art sense. I learned to copy Bargues, studied oil painting, all that. I attended quite a few workshops at The Academy of Realist Art Boston that would involve me standing for around ten hours a day in front of a canvas and drawing or painting a model for a week straight. After that, somewhere around quarantine, I got an iPad, and I started exploring digital art, realized that the ipad gave me a relatively easy avenue into animation, so I started small with little GIFs and things. Played around with it, did some short animations for school projects in high school. Then started animating more seriously.
“I used to watch a lot of Soviet cartoons growing up, and I think that the very surrealistic, even uncanny vibe is prevalent in animations”
S.B.: Do you think your background in these traditional forms of art helped you with the animations that you do now?
V.C.: For sure. I think that learning to capture form, even if it’s in a distorted sense like what you’d see in animations, you still need to know the traditional anatomy and how you’re changing it, rather than not being able to control the unnatural proportions which would make the end product look immature rather than stylized.
S.B.: So what drew you to surrealism in your work?
A Still from Choulga’s The Prayer
V.C.: I used to watch a lot of Soviet cartoons growing up, and I think that the very surrealistic, even uncanny vibe is prevalent in animations. And, in high school, that background drew me to a bunch of spooky videos I found online, a lot of which turned out to be old surrealist films like Un Chien Andalou. I enjoy that feeling of uncanny, because it’s very difficult to describe how to create an uncanny atmosphere. There’s no set formula. So trying to produce the effect I find really interesting.
S.B.: You said it’s difficult to describe how to make, but if you were forced to describe to someone who wanted to start making surrealist work, what are some of the core elements of that work?
V.C.: Surrealist or uncanny?
S.B.: Surrealist.
V.C.: I think working with the idea of dreams, and the way that logic doesn’t really work in dreams but still could make sense in some convoluted way is an idea that’s important. So, in the sense that not all of the meaning is clear, but had you some extra knowledge, you could probably figure it out, but you don’t, so you can’t. And also working with proportions, and making them look almost human– that sense of vagueness or ambiguity. So, changing proportions, but ever so slightly.
S.B.: I like this idea of if you just had a bit more information you can understand it. Your work resists easy interpretation or explanation. Do you want people to try and find the “point” of the animations that you make? Or do you want them to just be experienced?
“I think in general I’m just kind of trying to create a sort of mood, and how I can change that mood depending on what I show.”
V.C.: I think it’s always fun to hear people try. I’ve heard a lot of different interpretations and regardless of how much you read into it, there’s always something that doesn’t fall in line. I’ve heard some really interesting interpretations, but I think in general I’m just kind of trying to create a sort of mood, and how I can change that mood depending on what I show. I’m the same way when watching films that are purposefully confusing. For example with Mulholland Drive or Synecdoche New York, I’m happy simply experiencing the film rather than trying to create a theory for the symbolism behind each scene.
S.B.: I wanted to ask you a bit about Godot. Is the title a Waiting for Godot reference?
V.C.: Yes!
S.B.: Nice. So, the dialogue in it is few and far between, and the way you have it in the subtitles reminds me a bit of the intertitles that are spliced into silent movies. I was wondering what your thought process was of including dialogue so sparingly, but very deliberately.
V.C.: A big reason for the lack of dialogue was from technical limitations, because it's difficult to record a voice and make it sound professional without hiring a professional voice actor. Also, it turned out difficult to put voices into a soundtrack, just because a lot of the beginning of the animation when I made it was silent, nobody was saying anything, so it would seem jarring to add a voice a few minutes in after the tone of the animation had been set. I did play around a little with the flower guy saying, I forget which line it was, but you can see his mouth moving in the animation at one point. I added a voice to that and it didn’t seem to fit the tone so I took it out.
A Still from Choulga’s Godot
S.B.: What’s your actual material process like? Do you storyboard, do you sketch out scenes beforehand? How does something go from an idea in your head to a finished product?
V.C.: I’m slowly trying to get into the storyboard process, so the animation I’m working on right now, I made a very concrete storyboard, and I’m working through each scene. I like to talk with professors like Dan Morgan or Jim Lastra–people who are very knowledgeable about film, getting critiques, and that’s very difficult if you don’t have some sort of visual idea to share what the finished product would resemble. But with Godot I had made the first two or three minutes without any sort of plan in mind. Then when I put in an application for Fire Escape to get funding and a deadline, I had to write out the whole plot and I kind of had an image in my mind of what everything would look like. But I didn’t storyboard for Godot.
“I like to talk with professors like Dan Morgan or Jim Lastra–people who are very knowledgeable about film, getting critiques, and that’s very difficult if you don’t have some sort of visual idea to share what the finished product would resemble.”
A Still from Choulga’s Godot
S.B.: There’s a wide variety of faces in Godot. Some are very simple, like the protagonist’s, some are very intricate, like the flower guy that you were talking about, and then obviously there’s the part where the woman wipes her face off. What’s the significance of that, or is it just an easy way to access the uncanny because faces are so familiar?
V.C.: I wanted to keep Godot’s character design simple just because I draw him a lot, so it reduces the workload. With the singer, yes it was a very cool visual, but it also made my life a lot easier for drawing her in scenes since I didn’t have to redraw a complicated face with expressions for each frame, so again it was from a time-saving standpoint. For the flower man, I hadn’t planned to make him very mobile, which allowed for a more intricate character design. I think the stillness, and the intricacy, you could interpret as a sort of powerful presence, but that wasn’t really my intention.
A Still from Choulga’s Godot
S.B.: When the average person hears the term surrealist or uncanny, they probably think of static images like Dali or maybe Escher or something. What do you think film or animation as a form brings to surrealism that other forms do not?
V.C.: I think that though it’s perhaps lesser known, the surrealist movement was also in film around the 1920s and onwards, and I think that it brings in the same ideas and effects from a different standpoint since it’s a different medium. So for example a lot of surrealist films–like Un Chien Andalou, Destino, or even Daisies– a lot of them are a montage of seemingly unrelated shots or sequences that make a mood or philosophical statement. They’re really trying to gauge some sort of emotional reaction from the viewer. I think they’re inducing the same dreamlike effect, it’s just lesser known.
“Though it’s perhaps lesser known, the surrealist movement was also in film around the 1920s and onwards, and I think that it brings in the same ideas and effects from a different standpoint since it’s a different medium.”
A Still from Choulga’s Godot
S.B.: I know you mentioned Soviet film, Soviet movies. Do you have some favorites, some influences specifically you can name that you look to?
V.C.: In terms of Soviet animation, Hedgehog in the Fog is a big one. That sort of stillness or quietness as one ventures into the unknown. I really enjoy the character design in The Glass Harmonica. In terms of influences in general, Un Chien Andalou definitely shaped my understanding of the surrealist genre when I was just getting into it in highschool. Possibly in Michigan is another favorite. I think the analogue horror genre, like The Mandela Catalogue, was also influential in its ability to produce the uncanny. I love Perfect Blue–it’s surrealist with its confusion of reality and fantasy, and I really liked the film’s use of red from a thematic standpoint. The specific shade of red that they use in the film is my favorite color. I don’t know if I use it in Godot as much, but I have in past animations and I think it’s very powerful.
S.B.: Where do you see your work going in the future? What do you want to do after college?
V.C.: Well, I’ve been making two animations a year with Fire Escape and plan to continue until I graduate. I’ve also been polishing Godot to submit to festivals in the near future. In terms of the long run, I think that’s a difficult question, just because I don’t want to be one of many working for someone big like Disney, but it’s not profitable to have an indie studio. Getting into the arthouse scene could be fun. I always have my economics major to fall back on.
S.B.: That’s true. So I’m from Sliced Bread magazine, so as the final question, I have to ask, if you were a type of bread, what type would you be?
A Still from Choulga’s Upcoming Project
V.C.: Let’s see. I’m going to overthink this. How many types of bread do I know? I feel like… a brioche, but one that's made to have certain things put on top of it. I think I can be pretty versatile.
S.B.: That’s a great answer.
V.C.: I don’t know if that makes sense.
S.B.: No, I get it, I see the vision, I like it. Thank you so much, Veronica.
V.C.: Of course.