Tag: documentary
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Lisa Pau
MFA Experimental Animation
California Institute of the Arts
available for work inquiries – loupau@alum.calarts.edu
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Jerzy Kucia
Scriptwriter, artistic director, animated film director, artist, producer and university teacher. He was born on 14 January in Sołtysy near Wieluń. He earned his degree from the Painting and Graphic Arts Department of Krakow Academy of Fine Arts (1967). He was a student of the same Animated Film Studio that he began to run in 1981. Jerzy Kucia has taught at a number of film schools including those in Vancouver, London and Mumbai. He is also a graphic artist. Since 1970 he has been associated with the Animated Film Studio and in 1992 he started to produce his own films. Professor Kucia co-organizes and runs the International Animated Film Workshops in Krakow. In 1994 – 1997 he was the Vice-president of Association Internationale du Film d’Animation (ASIFA). Jerzy Kucia has won many awards, which include the First Prize of the Wiosna Opolska Festival (1970), the Award of the City of Krakow (1982), the First Degree Award of the Minister of Culture and Arts in Animation (1985), Krakow’s Governor Award for artistic achievement in animation and educational activity (1993), MTV Bronze Award (1994), the Prize of the Holland Animation Film Festival in Utrecht (1996), the Award of the City of Krakow for achievement in culture promotion (1996), the Special Golden Dinosaur for the ability to combine artistic and pedagogical activity awarded at the Etiuda International Film Festival in Krakow (2003) and numerous festival prizes.
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David Lynch
Six Figures Getting Sick (Six Times)[edit]
Main article: Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1966). Originally untitled, “Six Men Getting Sick” is a one-minute color animated film that consists of six loops shown on a sculptured screen of three human-shaped figures (based on casts of Lynch’s own head as done by Jack Fisk) that intentionally distorted the film[1]. Lynch’s animation depicted six people getting sick: their stomachs grew and their heads would catch fire.
Lynch made this film during his second year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The school held an experimental painting and sculpture exhibit every year and Lynch entered his work in the Spring of 1966. The animated film was shown on “an Erector-set rig on top of the projector so that it would take the finished film through the projector, way up to the ceiling and then back down, so the film would keep going continuously in a loop. And then I hung the sculptured screen and moved the projector back till just what I wanted was on the screen and the rest fell back far enough to disappear” (Chris Rodley, editor of Lynch on Lynch). Lynch showed the whole thing with the sound of a siren as accompaniment. The film cost $200 and was not intended to have any successors. It was merely an experiment on Lynch’s part because he wanted to see his paintings move.
The Alphabet
The Alphabet (1968) combines animation and live action and goes for four minutes. It has a simple narrative structure relating a symbolically rendered expression of a fear of learning. The idea for The Alphabet came from Lynch’s wife, Peggy Lentz, a painter whose niece, according to Lynch in Chris Rodley’s Lynch on Lynch book, “was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that’s sort of what started The Alphabet going.” Based on the merits of this short film, Lynch was awarded an American Film Institute production grant and became a minor celebrity.
Ghost of Love
Moby ‘Shot in the Back of the Head’
I touch a Red Button Man
Six Figures Getting Sick 1966
The Grandmother (1970, 33 minutes).
The short film combines live action and animation. The story revolves around a boy who grows a grandmother to escape neglect and abuse from his parents. It is mostly silent with only occasional vocal outbursts of gibberish and soundtrack cues used to convey story.
The music in the film was provided by a local group known as Tractor, and marked the first time Lynch would work with Alan Splet, who was recommended to the filmmaker by the soundman of The Alphabet. Initially, Lynch and Splet intended to use a collection of sound effects records for the film, but after going through them all they found that none of them were useful. So, Lynch and Splet took sixty-three days to make and record their own sound effects.
The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988, 26 minutes)
Slapstick, made for French television as part of the series The French as Seen by… by French magazine Figaro. It stars Harry Dean Stanton, Frederic Golchan and Jack Nance.
Lumière: Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1996, 52 seconds)
Originally included as a segment in the 1995 film Lumière et compagnie. Forty acclaimed directors created works using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière brothers.
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Jonathon Hodgson
Jonathan Hodgson is an internationally renowned animation director based in London, he has twice won BAFTAs for Best Short British Animation in 2000 and 2019. He studied animation at Liverpool Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. After spending 25 years directing commercials he moved to academia, setting up and leading the Animation degree at Middlesex University where he combines teaching with making personal films. He is the animation director of Wonderland: The Trouble with Love and Sex, the first full length animated documentary on British TV.
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William Kentridge
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds’ screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
See more information on Tate Gallery websiteAnimator William Kentridge animates with charcoal on paper, leaving traces of each drawing behind as the movement progresses. These traces lend a depth to the image as well as the time of the animation. They also serve a narrative purpose. Kentridge’s early animations were copied from early Soviet films, placed in the Apartheid, South African context. Apartheid was a system predicated on the exploitation of black South African labour in the interests of white South African society. Kentridge uses his animation to express his feelings of guilt for being a white male with inherited wealth and status as well as his personal fantasies of acceptance and forgiveness. The layered shadows of previous drawings that haunt his animations are ghostly reminders of the time that each drawing took to make. Animation here serves as a kind of penance.
Working process
Examples of charcoal animation
Evocative charcoal drawings of Johannesburg. Has detailed historical overview, but the images could speak for themselves. -
Maya Deren
Meshes of the afternoon is a short experimental film directed by wife-and-husband team Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film’s narrative is circular and repeats several motifs, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper–like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean. Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film depicts a world in which it is more and more difficult to catch reality.
With the original soundtrack – no music.
Maya Deren , Marcel Duchamp – 1943 Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) is a short, silent experimental film directed by Maya Deren. Like Deren’s previous work, A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), she explores the use of dance on film through the lens of commentary of societal norms, metamorphosis, and anthropomorphism. The film is notable for its disjointed storytelling and use of slow motion, freeze framing, and unique blend of stage dance and film.