Good morning 🐣

Engineer and stop-motion animator Brett Foxwell has worked on films like “The Boxtrolls” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” but he’s been experimenting on a smaller, more personal scale with more elemental media.

He released a piece less than two minutes long in 2017 titled “WoodSwimmer,” which captures sequential images of “cross-sectional photographic scans of pieces of hardwood, burls and branches” as they go through a milling machine. As you can see in these GIFs made from the video, it’s mesmerizing, moving more like a fluid than the solid wood our sense of time is used to.

His latest work, “The Book of Leaves,” builds off this idea and cycles through thousands of leaves as they change shape and hue, subtly blending from one to the next.

Now watch this 👀

I swear these newsletters all seem to come together and write themselves. I’m a little late to the game and just got the bivalent COVID booster, so I’m laying around with a fever and thought I’d watch the new COVID-themed slasher movie, “Sick.” It’s co-written by Kevin Williamson, the writer of the original “Scream,” which itself has a new sequel in theaters this week. Serendipity, I say.

It stars Gideon Adlon as Parker, a college student heading to a remote lakeside cabin to quarantine in the early days of the pandemic. (Fun fact: her mom, Pamela Adlon, voiced little Bobby Hill on “King of the Hill.” Gideon was also in “The Craft: Legacy” if you wanna keep the ’90s-esque vibes going.) Anyways, Parker invites her friend Miri (Beth Million) to quarantine with her and then Parker’s ex shows up uninvited. The three party until people start getting killed off by a surgical-masked stranger.

It also features Marc Menchaca as a psycho John Malkovich lookalike, as well as Jane Adams in a funny sequence seen in the trailer where she drives up to a desperate Parker on the side of the road — who is actively being chased by the killer — and insists Parker put a mask on before getting in the car and driving off to safety. The movie has a lot of fun with that early-pandemic paranoia:

• coughing in public,
• directional arrows on the ground in stores,
• washing your groceries,
• emptying a full can of Lysol in the air,

but I like that COVID isn’t just a gimmick; it actually plays an important role in the plot. It’s nothing very original to the genre, nor even Kevin Williamson’s writing career, but it’s fun and director John Hyams has a lot of experience with close-quarters fight scenes, which really helps give it that extra polish. Plus the tagline — “If you have to scream, cover your mouth” — makes it a winner in my book.

Until next time! 👋