"Life portrayed as a big clock, in which people are like cogs and can dance or be just a detail."
The Cags is a short film by Alexei Petrov that features strong social criticism and employs playful choreography, minimalist mise-en-scène and muted colors (with the exception of gold as a symbol). The author went through the experience of living in a big city, seeing how people worked all day and were too busy or tired to enjoy life. In his own words “people who had forgotten about their dreams” and were “managed by the system”. The Cags is the story of a man and woman that are happy, but their wish of wanting to have the life of other cogs brings them to the “jail”.
Alexei was inspired by the work of the Brothers Quay and Pixar’s shorts, and in this film he mixes stop motion and CG animation techniques (he actually started using stop motion animation only, but was convinced later that certain movements could only be achieved using 3D). An interesting extra note, he also programmed the script needed to generate the trails of the cogs (which were animated in 3DS Max), and the idea for the trails themselves came from the need to add depth to the image.
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