Carried Away

The scouts

Most people would play it safe with a six-minute meditation on artistic struggle, but Von Helmolt and Pakarnyk layer photographs under drawings under color swells until the whole thing turns inside out—it's formally restless in ways that shouldn't work but somehow do.

The precision here is in the palimpsest itself: photographs, colour drawings, and animation stacked to articulate creation as an archaeology of image-making, situating the work squarely in a lineage of structural and essayistic animation that prizes medium-specificity.

The decision to use photographs as a grid beneath the animated gesture—anchoring the surreal in something documentary-real—is what makes the abstraction land; it's the kind of formal constraint that turns a modest budget into something that feels architecturally necessary.