Sean Pecknold emerges from his makeshift cave of an animation room that has been sectioned off from the studio he shares with Adi Goodrich. He is bearded, tall, and lanky, wearing a white t-shirt and jeans. In conversation, he is soft-spoken, pausing often to think, and frequently draws connections and associations between the unlikeliest of subjects. As an animator and film-maker — known for music videos he created for Fleet Foxes, Beach House, Grizzly Bear, and most recently, Nicolas Godin — Sean begins his creative process by linking random associations and turning them into a big list of ideas, which he then parses and refines.
Sean’s work is an amalgam of both digital and analog craft, but the majority of his time is spent on the painstaking work of stop-motion animation using clay and paper figurines. He’s devoted himself to an art form concerned with the most minute of movements. Like his stop-motion videos, where the accelerated passage of time makes his characters come to life, time seems to speed up when he immerses himself in one of his handmade worlds — sometimes 12 hours will feel like 30 minutes, he says.
The Esprit de Corps series explores the creative camaraderie and communion of Adi Goodrich, Sean Pecknold, Eric Johnson, Graham Keegan, and Stephanie Gonot. Despite the multiple degrees of separation that urban living in Los Angeles seems to enforce, they have found what might be most rare and desired in any city: the sense of belonging to a community.
