Special effects without computers

Eric Dyer, a 35-year-old Baltimore filmmaker, probably does not see himself as revolutionary.

But in a world dominated by computers and digitized special effects, Dyer's championing of ages-old techniques to tell stories in new, untried ways has propelled him into the ranks of the truly avant-garde, so much so that the likes of Robert Redford, at the recent Sundance Film Festival, have stood up and taken notice.

Dyer, who teaches animation at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has won awards at several U.S. film festivals and had his short, intensely visual films seen at dozens of others. While some of those films relied on computers to build their largely abstract images, Dyer's latest work, Copenhagen Cycles, hews closely to his emerging mantra that the creative process be removed from the digital realm and put back, literally, into people's hands.

"A lot of creativity goes out the window," he said, when student filmmakers rely exclusively on computers. "And a lot of the passion and creativity come back when they use their hands again."

To illustrate his point, Dyer, sitting at his dining room table in Wyman Park, showed a visitor how he had painstakingly assembled Copenhagen Cycles, a montage of hundreds of images he photographed in the streets of the Danish capital. Each image was then meticulously cut out in silhouette and placed on a series of zoetropes, which, since they were invented in 1834, are about as far from a computer as one can imagine. (Most zoetropes consist of a series of pictures printed on paper strips attached to the inside of a revolving drum. The images, when viewed through small slits in the drum, appear to move sequentially when the drum is spun.)

For Copenhagen Cycles, Dyer built 25 zoetropes in the form of paper sculptures covered in pictures. Spinning wildly, they were filmed in high-speed digital video, so that the resulting 6 1/2 -minute film, densely edited into revolving, throbbing images, is a whirlwind of sight and sound, riveting in its unpredictability.

More impressive still is the fact that Dyer is doing what he does while suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that is already forcing him, among other things, to use large typeface when reading e-mails.

"People are most creative when they have limitations imposed on them," said Dyer, who with his wife, Heidi, has a 3-year-old daughter, Mia, and an 8-month-old son, Finn. "As my eyesight weakens, my vision strengthens. The way I see the world now is like a pointillist painting -- you don't get all the detail. And that's my optimistic side. My pessimistic side says it's like a UHF channel that's very noisy, out of tune."

At Sundance, Copenhagen Cycles was shown alongside his spinning zoetropes as part of the event's New Frontiers program. Visitors to the festival in Park City, Utah, which ended last weekend, got to see not only the film itself but how it was made, using technology both old and new.

Sundance, with its cutting-edge directors and an independent ethos, was the perfect place to show Copenhagen Cycles, he said, because "it bookends cinema's history."

"It's a pop-up book collage in motion," Dyer said of his film.

When Redford stopped by Jan. 18, Dyer said, the filmmaker had only a couple of minutes to explain the intricacies of his work.

A videotape of the encounter shows Redford telling Dyer, "You know what I really like hearing about? How you wanted to move away from the computer and do something with your hands. I mean that's very exciting. Let's see where you can go next."

Dyer explained to the gum-chewing Redford that his next project does, in fact, involve a computer, but only partly. His plan is to build three-dimensional models of zoetropes on a computer that will then be printed on a three-dimensional printer. Using the models, Dyer will shoot a high-definition film inspired by the rebirth of Berlin after the 1989 fall of the wall and using "parallels to modern political situations."

A Baltimore native, Dyer earned a bachelor's degree in visual arts and film from UMBC and a master of fine arts degree from Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He also studied screenwriting and animation at New York University and the Pratt Institute in New York. His music videos, including one for Baltimore band the Jennifers that he produced with an $80 budget, have been shown on MTV, while his short films have won awards at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival and the Red Bank International Film Festival, both in New Jersey.

His work has also been shown at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Jacksonville (Fla.) Museum of Modern Art. He won a Fulbright Fellowship in 2005, which enabled him to spend eight months in Denmark and produce the initial work for Copenhagen Cycles.

"He's a major talent," said Jed Dietz, director of the Maryland Film Festival, who exhibited Copenhagen Cycles during last year's event in Baltimore. Dietz was also at Sundance this year and stopped by to see Copenhagen in its Park City incarnation.

"I went through it a couple of times because I was curious," Dietz said, "and there were people coming through all the time."