Pacific Sun

Overview

Demand's most challenging and sophisticated project to date, Pacific Sun is a 100-second animated film based on a YouTube clip, capturing the tumultuous effects of a storm on the cruise ship Pacific Sun. Over the course of months, and with the help of a 12-person team of animators, Demand carefully constructed a model of the ship's dining room in his signature media: paper and cardboard. In a painstaking process, he then brought the set to life through stop-motion animation. Demand meticulously retraced the movements of each item in the room—from chairs and tables to lemon slices at the bar—and recorded each shift in a single frame. The combined total of 2,400 frames creates a continuous film. The process resembles a technologically advanced version of Eadweard Muybridge's early animations of animals in motion. Devoid of human actors, Pacific Sun results in a surreal, stylized, but oddly familiar film that evokes memories of disasters at sea.