Projects in Film/Video

FILM

– In November 2011 I shot and edited my first short film, Texture. Set to a song from Catherine Wheel’s 1992 album Ferment, this short film/music video of the same name explores the textures of the natural world by means of the potentials for revisioning allowed by digital editing software.

Viewing visual experience as raw material for cinematic worldslicing, this short film works to recast various aspects of the natural world in order to create an affectscape which can be unleashed from natural objects means of various digital tools. Branches become wires of fire, rusted pipes become throbbing planets, and tree stumps become lunar landscapes in a symphonic structure whose interweaving is a counterpoint to the music’s insistent call for ‘more texture.’

In the process, the domestic enclosure of the home is blasted apart by clashes of textural forces, pitting verdant green against wintery grey, natural colors against artificial hues, and familiar forms of vision against those which can be produced by non-standard angles, speeds, magnifications, filterings, layerings, and more.

Inspired by the films of Stan Brackhage, Andrei Tarkovsky, Pier Paulo Pasolini, and the philosophy of cinema of Gilles Deleuze, this short film is a first attempt to put into practice some of the ideas described in my manifesto for film/video called Towards a Cinema of Affects.

Texture was shot in the Prospect Park South section of Brooklyn, on a Panasonic Lumix GH-2 DSLR camera. All editing was done on Final Cut Pro X.

– In addition to Texture, I have completed a script, treatment, and storyboards for a full-length, experimental film with a working title of Mirrorball. I will be looking for funding to start work on this film in the near future.

– Lastsly, a fun tidbit, a short satirical video on the foibles of attempting to study continental philosophy at a graduate level. It shows an undergraduate interested in starting grad work in philosophy attempt to make sense with an advisor of why this is a strange request. As of March 2015, this video has 61,424 views on YouTube since it was first posted in 2010.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q5OoyaetfI]