FEELER GAUGE FESTIVAL
BLOCK 3 FLICKER
PROGRAMMERS' NOTES: Each of these six films include flickers, flashes or flutters – fast, familiar, or reframing.
Alluding to the successively thinner blades of a feeler gauge, Erica blends the same footage passed through successively extreme filters into a crackling breathing cycle.
Candles flicker, lightening flashes and a sun flutters into view in Caleb's film, where we anticipate the end of pandemic-related isolation, and friends reunite at last in Christian's film, where a single tea light flame spotlights a miniature theater stage.
Through miniature theater in her film, Amy multiplies herself as subject, as she both appears in and animates a photograph. Alex multiples his subject – a cat – and our perception of it as well, through changing frame rates in his film.
In closing, Joana markedly slows us down with an extended time lapse sequence, inviting us to be present to rare and precious quivers that metaphorically reference significant moments in our lives.
Total run time: 28:15 mins
Image: Caleb Craig, Separation (film still)
Through modulations, a digital video is filtered and re-defined into layers of breathing particles.
Separation is about the isolation we have been living in. In the film, we go through a cycle from night to day, enduring a dark storm to reach a new dawn where life awakens again. I hope to remind viewers that there is light ahead and that all things, good and bad, change eternally.
A stag from the land of sunshine makes a trip to visit his friend, a polar bear, in the icy north. This is a tiny story of reunion told over three matchbox theatre stages. Using the age-old and hands-on storytelling techniques of puppetry and miniatures, Together Again reminds the viewer of the simple pleasure of connection and the timelessness of love and friendship.
Faux Shutters is a gesture of domesticated space, production of memories, mimicry, and fakery.
Frraatmee feat. Smoking Cat is a short variable frame rate film which mixes drawn frame and traced stop motion. The "control group" tile is at the bottom row of the third column from the left. Each successive row above the base row, frames are removed from the set of 24 until there is only one left. From left to right, column playback speeds are 4x, 2x, 1x and 0.5x.
Lilies is about the subtle changes that surround us. If we are not present and aware, we miss them, and they might never come back.