OBJECT LESSONS: THE UNCANNY MIND OF PES, WEb-animator

PES is one of the most talented and inventive short-film stars of the Internet age. Highlighted in a host of publications (from the New York Times to Wired), the 33-year-old self-taught animator and commercial director (born Adam Pesapane) first tasted fame with his hilarious 1-minute short "Roof Sex" (see it at eatpes.com). Since then, he's made ads for Bacardi, Nike, Diesel and most recently PlayStation, and his latest witty creation "Game Over" is now available on AtomFilms.

Perfectly suited for the 1980's video game junkie, "Game Over" recreates several early games, from Centipede to Space Invaders to Pac-Man, using real-life three-dimensional objects. For example, the space invaders are plastic bugs; Pac-Man is a pizza.

"I was interested in taking something that was electronic and remaking it by hand," PES told me in interview for RES Magazine, a dedicated supporter of PES. (RESFEST recently premiered the short as part of its traveling film festival.) "Game Over" also allowed for some of PES's favorite puzzle-like associations (i.e., in Frogger, a pretzel "log" stands in for a wooden log).

"I force people to look at familiar things differently," PES explaned, evoking that strange Freudian notion of the "uncanny." He wrote a paper about it ten years ago, he admits, while studying English and printmaking at the University of Virginia.

While some day he'd like to make a miniature stop-motion epic made completely out of objects and plastic figurines, he said there is a downside to being the "object" guy.

"It's been a double-edged sword, because I've naturally gone along this object road and some of them have become very popular online and people know me as the object guy. But I don't necessarily consider myself that," he added. "I hear, 'We saw 'Roof Sex'; we have these Taco Bell sauce packets; what can you come up with for them?"