Maya Edelman is an animation director from Brooklyn, NY. She recently directed and animated an episode for the second season of the upcoming New York Times series, Conception: Parenting in 2018.
How did growing up in the Soviet Union impact your journey to filmmaking?
I was deeply influenced by the kind of media available to me when I was younger — we didn’t have a TV until I was 10. We didn’t have access to a lot of American movies, but we did have really beautiful stop motion and animated films. Certain things like a Soviet era sci-fi series called Guest From The Future and an animated film by Yuri Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog stayed with me and still influence my work today.
I’ve always been a big reader and learned to find inspiration from books very early on. I loved to draw and made the fortunate mistake of going to college for animation, thinking it would be more like illustration. By senior year, I learned to understand and appreciate it more and fell in love with animated storytelling.
How do your story ideas emerge?
I keep a sketchbook with me and draw often. A lot of the ideas I end up using are things i worked out on my sketch book page. Characters, faces, thought out concepts that come from exploration. Here in NY, you can take the subway and see a million interesting faces. There’s boundless inspiration in this city. I’m drawn to telling the kind of stories that describe reality without explicitly saying that things are what they are. Stories that leave room for the imagination.
Maya
What captivates your imagination?
Nature springing up in manmade and unexpected places despite all of our efforts.
As an immigrant, I’m interested in human stories around migration and freedom of movement. Things with borders and those between.
Is there a place you go to find inspiration?
I go to books. When I read, I imagine what the characters might look like and then I draw them. Sometimes I’ll listen to an audio book and sketch the things i’m listening to. It gives me a way to reimagine the story from my own interpretation. Bike rides are a really great source of inspiration — it clears your head. Plus, the focus of trying not to get hit by a car gives me clarity and the ability to think creatively.
What is your approach to collaboration?
Animation is such a massive, involved human endeavor that it can only be achieved through collaboration. That’s what I love so much about it — the opportunity to trust other people’s vision and talent, and being delighted at what they come back with.
As a visual artist and a storyteller, how does the current climate impact your work?
It seems that we have found ourselves in a climate where there appears to be a profound disconnect between people. It’s as if there is a very sharp dividing line that nobody realized was there. And so it’s led me to think a lot about moving people toward understanding. I’m deeply convinced that the more stories you absorb and the more you read, the more empathy you have because in a way, empathy is imagination. Or, it’s something that requires imagination. It asks you to take a leap into another person’s place and consciousness. To strike that note as a story teller, to capture those small little details that are part of the human experience and make them reverberate through the imagination of someone else to the point where they are moved to find empathy and act upon it — that’s the challenge I’m interested in tackling.
For more on Maya and her work, please visit: https://www.majorityfilm.com/maya-edelman/
