Gallery: Meet PES, the Stop-Motion Genius Who Turns Grenades Into Fresh Guacamole
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The stop-motion auteur now known as PES lived in a tiny New York apartment while working a day job at an ad agency when he asked the simple question that would launch his new career. "These two chairs had been given to me by my parents," he told Wired by phone. "I was up one night in our bachelor pad with my roommate thinking, 'What would these chairs like to do after being cooped up in a house for 25 years?'" The answer: *Roof Sex*. "When I told my parents I was going to make two chairs fuck, they said, 'That's the stupidest thing I ever heard.'" Millions of web viewers begged to differ. The 2002 stop-motion short, which showed two stuffed chairs going at it atop a Manhattan apartment building, went viral and earned a Best First Film trophy at France's influential [Annecy Animation Festival](http://www.annecy.org/home). Then PES got really busy: His string of [strangely hypnotic short films](http://www.youtube.com/user/pesfilm) has attracted nearly 34 million views on YouTube and cemented his reputation as one of the most inventive DIY filmmakers of his generation. Last week, his ingenious *Fresh Guacamole* landed a slot on the Oscar short-animation short list. Czech Mate ---------- One day in 1997, PES walked into a screening of *The Conspirators of Pleasure* by Czech animator [Jan Švankmajer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Švankmajer). "I marveled at a person pulling off a feature film without any words and became curious about this stop-motion technique," PES said. "I remember seeing it in *Clash of the Titans* but he was using it in a totally different way, as a language of objects." To soak up the stop-motion sensibility, PES bought everything by Švankmajer he could find, including old VHS tapes and bootlegs. "I watched them over and over and over," he said. "The genius behind these films opened up this notion that I have ideas about objects, too. That's where my approach was born, though I wanted to do it with a little bit of a narrative versus surrealism." Second in a series of Showtime-financed PES shorts, *Fresh Guacamole* takes the viewer through a succession of meticulously staged steps in the making of an alternate-universe version of the avocado-based Mexican sauce. Hand grenades, baseballs and dice are in the frenetic stop-motion "recipe," which shows off PES' taste for bringing inanimate objects to strange new life. "I haven't figured out exactly where this fascination comes from, but it's sort of embedded in my sense of humor," the 39-year-old Santa Monica, California-based filmmaker said. "I'll see something in an object and think it looks like something else. It's just something my brain does naturally." Art and Underwear Paper ----------------------- Born Adam Pesapane, [PES](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PES_(director)) grew up in New Jersey. His mother, a hairdresser, and father, an elementary school principal, discouraged TV watching in their house but were happy to arrange private art lessons for their clever son. By high school, PES was staging art shows featuring his portraits, watercolors and illustrations. Studying English at the University of Virginia, PES printed his own books using paper made from recycled underwear. "One of my professors at college had a paper-making machine," he said. "You could put old underwear into this machine, break it into pulp, and turn it into paper to print our books on. I'd get free paper from all this underwear my parents sent me from New Jersey." PES became enthralled with printmaking. "I really got into using 15th-century copper-etching techniques to engrave text backwards," he said. "I published a little story about my grandmother, who served us disgusting meatloaf. I'd pretend to eat it but snuck it out in napkins under the table. I turned that into a book illustrated in the style of Dante's *Inferno* and printed a copy or two." PES did not study film at college, but when he arrived in New York after graduation, the gig he landed as an assistant to the creative director at [McCann-Erickson](http://mccann.com/) provided a portal into the world of cutting-edge short film. "I'd see early work by Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze when they were doing music videos, and I'd see all this very adventurous stuff coming out of Amsterdam in the late '90s," he said. "I realized a commercial was just a tight story — a short film with a logo at the end. It occurred to me, 'Why does it have to be selling a product? Why can't I just make a freestanding thing that's just one minute long in a format that people have become familiar with for 50 years? You can't do much character development, but there's time for good ideas in 30 seconds." See several of PES' amazing short films in the video gallery above, in which he also provides some background on his inspiration and a look at upcoming projects.
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Softballs, Hand Grenades and *Fresh Guacamole* ---------------------------------------------- Working without sketches or storyboards, PES developed *Guacamole* with a fusion of free-associating trial and error undergirded by rigorous logic. Spliced, diced and precision-edited, the ingredients in *Guacamole,* as in every PES piece, get served up with one goal in mind: to keep the surprises coming. "The first node of the idea was to use an avocado as a grenade. This type of grenade is actually called a 'pineapple' but to me, because of its color and texture, it always resembled an avocado. Once I had the core ingredient of the dish, I built around it almost as a game for myself: Do I have enough good ideas to fill it out and make an entire dish? Tomatoes, onion, lime, cilantro, chips. It's pretty basic." PES double-checked his facts during a trip to Mexico and altered his animation accordingly. "In my research I found out only Americans put cilantro in their guacamole so I left that out." "Once I had all the ideas for each ingredient, like peeling a dirty softball and turning it into a clean white baseball as the interior of an onion, then it was just a matter of figuring out which order they should be in."
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Apartment Fire Inspires *KaBoom!* --------------------------------- PES regards his 2004 short *KaBoom!* as a turning point in terms of complexity and content. "This film really crystallized for me that there really is a language for objects." *KaBoom!* rose from the ashes of a domestic disaster in the home he shares with his wife and business manager Sarah Phelps. "We had an electrical fire in my apartment and it was just a pile of junk," he recalled. "I pulled out this circuit board and when I put it on the table, I thought, 'This really looks like a miniature city.' Everybody's familiar with that wasteland you see from the sky when you fly over a city. "My next thought was, 'If that's the base grid for a city, then what are the buildings?' I took my wife's perfume bottle, and salt-and-pepper shakers, and built this city on the table. But I didn't know what to do with it." The table setting collected dust for a few months. PES couldn't stand looking at it any more and got ready to throw it out. "Then I went: 'Why don't I stage the destruction of the city in a fantastical way where some plane's going to drop a giant thing on the city. What is like a bomb?" PES did his customary due diligence and began researching the topic. "I learned the code name for the Manhattan Project was Circus Peanut. Peanuts have similarity to atomic bombs — two chambers connected through a narrow channel. And at that time, the U.S. was dropping peanut butter on Iraq while bombs were dropping a hundred miles away."
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Self-Taught *Roof Sex* ---------------------- "No one taught me how to do this," said PES. "I started ordering doll furniture off of eBay and at night when we were done playing videogames, I'd stay up and animate the doll chairs on the dining room table. In the morning, I'd get the film processed and the next night, we'd watch the film on the little 16-millimeter projector. That's really how I learned to animate."
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Grokking the Garlic in *Western Spaghetti* ------------------------------------------ "In *Western Spaghetti*, the hardest thing for me to cast was garlic," PES recalled. "What is garlic? I had one nugget of a thought: The way you press your thumb on a clove or head of garlic until it cracks off — that reminded me of what we did growing up in the '80s with a Rubik's Cube, where someone would use their thumb to crack off the top cube and reassemble it. Even though a Rubik's Cube looks nothing like garlic, it's the way you work with the form — it leaves something for the viewer to do. They make the connection rather than everything just being a lookalike."
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*The Deep* and the PES Pipeline ------------------------------- PES produced *The Deep* in 2010 for Showtime's *[Short Stories](http://www.sho.com/sho/short-stories)* series. By then, the filmmaker had perfected a business model rooted in the early success of *Roof Sex*. Following its hit screening at Annecy, TV networks cut licensing deals with PES to broadcast the short in their part of their world. "I'd get a stipend with each of these TV companies," said PES. "That enabled me to make a little money and it was a real eye-opener. I realized I could make something that made me laugh without compromise and that other people would pay me to do what I wanted to do. To me, that defines art. I can make what I want and it will generate money without me having to bend the art in any way." Next Up: *Garbage Pail Kids* and *Lost & Found* ----------------------------------------------- PES continues to produce stop-motion films for Showtime's Short stories program, but he's also venturing into long-form features. Earlier this year, he began developing a movie based on the [Garbage Pail Kids](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Pail_Kids) trading cards introduced in 1985. PES promises his vision for the film has nothing to do with the cheesy 1987 movie that garnered a [zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/garbage_pail_kids_movie/). "I never saw that movie as a kid, and I don't count it at all as an inspiration," PES said. "I'm basing my film on the original property and what I want to do with those characters." Also in the pipeline: a feature called *Lost & Found* about a planet where lost things go. Based on an original idea by PES, the movie will incorporate his signature style. *Lost & Found* is being developed by PES and [KatzSmith Productions](http://www.katzsmith.com/), the production shingle of David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith (*Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter; Dark Shadows; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies*). No writer has been determined.
