The Craftsman: On the Resource of a Patient Artist Robbed of His Medium

Devin Scott’s The Craftsman is an AI generated animation about the patient labour that goes into honing and nurturing a craft. A biopic about the director’s great-grandfather, violin-maker Felix Landis, it retells how he lived through the years of WWII and its echoes in the world of music.

The film follows the making of a set of violins by Landis at a time of hardwood scarcity. When all the available hardwood was redirected into equipping the war, Landis found one last well of hope when his craft was in crisis: salvage yards. The heavy wood of discarded doors would do very well for the work of the violin maker. The dark times would not succeed in killing the music.

The individual violins form four separate sections, along with a prologue and an epilogue. The story is heavily dependent on the voiceover narration. There is some attention on the hands, crucial instruments and conduits of expression as they are, notably in shots showing Landis playing (using musician Michael R. Johnson with motion capture).  Set to a piano, violin, and viola score, the emphasis is devoted to the origins of the wood of each of the violins. Variously humble and grand doorways once held the wood that came to be Landis’s precious and precise violins. A church door became the Strawberry Blonde, a hotel led to The Songbird, a jail birthed The Darkness, and an armoire transformed into The Gambler. 

The Craftsman tells of resourcefulness at a time of painstaking highs and abominable lows of humanity while we go through fresh painstaking highs and abominable lows of humanity in real time. There are new wars as we write, new oligarchs with every byte, and new artists met with the baton of penury. One can only hope for a scrap of luck to hang on by. 

Watch The Craftsman Short Film