It's hard to imagine a presidential campaign more absurd than this one, but there is a parallel universe where Donald Trump takes a leak in public, Bernie Sanders does tai chi in Central Park and Ted Cruz giggles his way down a playground slide wearing overalls.
Joel Strong reveals this crazy world in Heads of State, his hilarious short film that features the candidates goofing off in New York, snapping selfies and getting into hijinks. The self-described satirical photographer used paper cutouts, forced perspective, and stop motion to craft a 90-second film where Monty Python meets E! Online. It all goes by in a flash, but the animation took hours of work, several models, and a lot of trial and error.
Strong started toying with the idea three years ago after learning of his girlfriend's crush on '90s Leonardo DiCaprio. He snipped photos of Leo from magazines and took pics of them wandering New York. Strong eventually realized he could use the same trick for other celebrities, superimposing their heads on people to create funny vignettes with the likes of Kanye, Miley, and Oprah.
Then he discovered stop-motion and things really got crazy. Beyonce was the first to get the treatment, appearing in a 15-second clip he posted to Instagram. Nearly 170,000 people follow Strong now, and he's managed to work several commercial gigs for various big names including Netflix, Entertainment Weekly, and the FX show Louie.
Heads of State, created in collaboration with Pop-Up Magazine, is his most ambitious project yet. Making the film required more than 80 cutouts, four models, and two weeks of shooting. The result is a joy to see, and has Strong thinking about longer pieces like commercials and even music videos. Each new challenge proves there's nothing his little cutouts can't do.
