Hi, I'm Christiane Cegavske, creator of Blood Tea and Red String. I'm making my second stop-motion animated feature, Seed in the Sand. Support production and get an exclusive, behind the scenes look at production and access to film clips that are for your eyes only! Rewards include access to broadcasts from my studio, digital files of production artwork and more!

I love animating and making puppets and sets. And I love to share my progress with you. While I am able to do much of the work on this film myself, I do need to hire some talented people to help me with the live action scenes and to create things like sound and music. Your pledges help pay for supplies for the sets and puppets and the production costs for the sound and music.

Thank you to all of my patrons for your interest in my project!

I have a strong record of both film exhibition and gallery showings. My personal work transcends the boundaries between animation and fine art. The characters who inhabit my animated world step into my gallery art, which in turn combines painting and sculpture with traditionally feminine crafts of sewing and quilting. With an emphasis on storytelling I am building a personal intuitive mythology by mixing symbols from dreams and magic with historical research, current events, and synchronistic discoveries. The symbolism found in my work is both deeply personal and anchored in our cultural collective imagination. Themes revolve around the cycle of death and rebirth, women’s mysteries, the juxtaposition of the maternal with the monstrous feminine, love versus greed, and how that greed is tied to ecological disaster.

Seed in the Sand, my new film in production, is primarily done in stop-motion animation along with limited use of live-action sequences. My main characters are furry, beaked creatures who live in nests in trees, but whose human side is expressed through the depth of their personal interactions, emotive singing, complicated rituals, and the pottery they make to store their food. As in an Aesop fable or Orwell’s Animal Farm, the animal skin serves as a vehicle to explore our human nature from a safe distance and allows many layers of symbolism and social commentary to intersect.

In Seed in the Sand, the seed delivered to the animated realm from the live-action world functions both as an actual seed that will grow into a tree, and as a symbol for the film’s central themes of greed, renewal, and transformation. As in a classic myth where the hero must descend to the underworld, the heroine in this film descends into a monster’s deep lair to save her baby and bring life back to her dying world. Music illuminates the internal experiences of the characters. Los Angeles-based contemporary musicians Karie Jacobson and Drew Kowalski are creating the music and building the post-tonal soundtrack. This collaboration extends to my gallery art as well, with the pair creating the soundscape of the immersive installation in my multimedia art show, Cotton Flesh and Stardust, shown in Los Angeles last summer and planned for Oakland, California, in summer 2022.

I am best known for my experimental, mythopoeic stop-motion animated feature film, Blood Tea and Red String, that tells a Grimms-like morality tale of anthropomorphic, aristocratic white mice who commission the Oak Dwellers to create a beautiful doll for them. As in an Aesop fable or Orwell’s Animal Farm, the animal skin serves as a vehicle to explore our human nature from a safe distance and creates an opportunity for the many layers of symbolism and social commentary to intersect. The film is dialogue-free, which has enabled it to reach audiences worldwide and allowed viewers to find their own meaningful interpretations of the symbolism.

Released in 2006, Blood Tea and Red String won awards, international distribution, and excellent reviews in the press.Variety called it"a David Lynchean fever dream on Beatrix Potter terrain...close in macabre spirit to the original versions of many classic fables," andThe New York Times considered it “[a]s much a work of sculpture as of cinema." In 2017 SyFy Wiredescribed it as a “fairy tale which touches on modern issues such as class differences, intellectual ownership and giving birth.” In a review from earlier this year Fangoria declared it "an animal fable both dark and explicitly feminist in its mission....so original and made with such clear passion that it almost takes you a moment to catch your breath."

Blood Tea and Red String has grown in acclaim since its premiere at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival where it won Best Animated Film. It has been included in critics’ lists such as Cinemaholic’s7 Best Stop-Motion Animated Movies of All Time, Taste of Cinema’s15 Best Surrealist Movies of The 21st Century, Syfy Wire’s8 Best Sci-Fi Films With Minimal Dialogue, and Cartoon Brew’sAnimated Films by Solo Artists. It has been cited in scholarly books and has been the topic of scholarly research papers.

My career as an animator and sculptor for television and film includes projects for The Oxygen Network, VH1, the Disney Channel and Fox at Space Bass Films, and Acme Filmworks in Los Angeles; a variety of projects with Bent Image Lab in Portland, Oregon; and sequences for Asia Argento’s film, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. I worked as CG and stop-motion animator, puppet maker, and creative and technical consultant for the award-winning film CIVET and designed and fabricated the puppet heads for Space Bass Films’ stop-motion animated sequence produced for NBC’s A Very Pentatonix Christmas.

To learn more about Seed in the Sand, please visit http://christianecegavske.com/seedinthesand.html