The jury for the Jim Thorpe Independent Film Festival has selected an animation by local artist Victor Stabin for inclusion in its 4th Annual Festival. Stabin’s animated short “E=MC3” will make its national premiere during the festival taking place April 22-25. This year’s festival had over 800 submissions from around the world.
In this surrealist dreamscape based on actual events, “E=MC3” is Victor Stabin’s bizarre tale of Albert Einstein’s invention and patenting of a perpetual motion refrigerator that brings peace to the Middle East. The animation combines fantastic imagery with tongue-in-cheek storytelling and plenty of schtick.
This story had its genesis in the strange but true account of Einstein’s work on a highly efficient refrigerator designed while in Berlin circa 1920s. This remarkable story combines Stabin’s long-running love affair with public radio with a narrative that unfolds through an NPR-style radio interview – an interview conducted by a talking clam.
Stabin reached out to some of his favorite public radio hosts to do the voices of the characters. To his surprise and delight, quite a few were willing to lend their voices to the project. The vocal ensemble features WHYY’s host of “Fresh Air,” Dave Davies; “Morning Edition” host and WNYC’s morning news director, the late Richard Hake; WNYC’s Andy Lanset; and host of “All Things Considered” at WNYC Radio, Jami Floyd.
Legendary Pocono jazz bass player Tony Marino and the talented local jazz sax player Kyle O’Brien and pianist Skyler Stabin provided original music for the soundtrack.
Victor Stabin is a Brooklyn-born artist, “eco-surrealist” painter, author, and illustrator. Early in his career, Stabin worked for numerous publications, including Newsweek, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and designed book covers for publishers Penguin Books, Random House, and others. His most well-known work as an illustrator includes painting nine stamps for the United States Postal Service, the cover for the KISS album Unmasked, and a mural for RCA/BMG’s headquarters.
Since leaving illustration, Stabin has created a suite of eco-surrealistic paintings and his “ABC Book for the Ages, Daedal Doodle.” He has developed Daedal Doodle into a curriculum and teaching tool used in numerous schools across the northeast, an endeavor sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. He began writing a series of short stories about the characters he developed in Daedal Doodle and has commenced turning those stories into animated shorts.
Stabin worked with award-winning animator Benjamin Arthur to bring his characters and phantasmagorical effects into existence. Arthur gained acclaim for “Once Upon a Time in the Woods,” an animation viewed over 1 million times on YouTube. Arthur has worked with Stanford University and Freakonomics and animated the popular Krulwich Wonders episodes “Why Can’t We Walk Straight?” and “The Billion Bug Highway.” He also created animations for RadioLab in conjunction with Robert Krulwich, one of which earned the pair a Multimedia Innovation award from the White House News Photographers Association.
“E=MC3” is definitely not the usual “detective retires to a small town and quickly gets sucked into the town’s dark underbelly.”
Stabin is honored to have been selected by the Jim Thorpe Independent Film Festival jury for its world debut.
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