Sol Abergel-Kaplan

Sol Abergel-Kaplan animates on paper. They studied printmaking, not animation, and came to film through a job colouring backgrounds at a studio in Mile End that mostly made preschool series. They work in gouache and ink at roughly A4, photograph the pages on a rostrum built from a copy stand and a camera on a rail, and composite with Yannick Prevost. A six minute film takes about eleven months. They do not write scripts. Instead they make a colour chart and a timing sheet first, and let the film find its own length. Hothouse was drawn over a winter in the palm house of a municipal greenhouse, with permission and a folding stool. They take commercial storyboard work three months a year to pay for the rest, and hand every finished film to a musician, most recently Mateo Ilagan, who they have never met in person.