FICTION + SCREENWRITING

Zachary Tyler Vickers is the author of the short story collection Congratulations on Your Martyrdom! His fiction has won numerous awards, like the Kurt Vonnegut Prize, and has appeared in many prominent journals, including Boston Review and The Saturday Evening Post. His fiction has been optioned for feature film, and his screenwriting has won Grand Prize at the Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival, as well as garnered recognition from the Austin Film Festival, the Nashville Film Festival, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and others. He has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Rep: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management.

ANIMATION

Zachary Tyler Vickers's independent "DIY" animation practice explores and reimagines historical techniques. His work has been screened internationally and has won awards, such as a Gold Remi at WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival and "Best Animation" at the Trenton Film Festival, among others. He holds an MFA from Temple University's Film & Media Arts program, and is Temple's Assistant Professor of Animation and Director of the Animation Concentration.

Artist Statement:

Process is integral to my semi-intuitive practice. For me, animation still evokes a childhood wonder: If animation is a magic trick then its encounter begets questions on how the trick works. My meticulous pre-production process for analog animation involves incorporating digital tools and rotoscoping in order to perfect the trick's technical construction and eventual filmic magic.

Process manifests in the final product: The magic trick features physical traces of the magician—the artist’s haptic presence—to further mystify. Fingerprints, material wrinkles, smudges, the curls of unbrushed crayon and palimpsestic, phantasmal erasures of pencil and pastel and charcoal: these are The Artist as Secondhand Animate Object.

Aural texture often complements visual texture through layered, manipulated audio. Every object contains noise, some latent musical language. Synesthesia is also a magic trick.

While my analog process embraces “messiness," my 2D digital process embraces "cleanness," scratching the ocular itch of my OCD. This work is influenced by childhood animations where the magic trick first took root: Looney Tunes Revival.

Text and image alike, through each medium's respective magic, allow me to intuitively make sense of what it means to be human, alive, and living in this strange, strange world.