Animation

Some Ghosts incorporates embroidery and stop-motion animation techniques to create a colorful dreamscape in which an unwitting spaceman releases angry spirits from a haunted medicine cabinet.

The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.

In this world, motion capture technology translates movement into data that can be unbound from the human body. Yvonne’s No Manifesto becomes a framework for understanding the existential impact of this new dataset. What happens to movement when it is divorced from affect and feeling? What happens to dance without the basic premise of embodiment and breath?

In i am wise enough to die things go (2023), Syms explores the idea of psychosis through an unnamed protagonist reciting a monologue. Responding to the work of iconic animator Chuck Jones, Syms transfers the form and narrative structure of an animated short into live-action. Working with the inherent challenges and restrictions brought about by this sort of translation, she delves into both the breaking up of images and the breakdown of the psyche.

In Bataille, fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon are subject to a mirror effect. A scene in which two samurai fight each other becomes a cosmic field of monsters where horror and pain evoke beauty and joy.

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born is a visually stunning work that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage and loss, but in which she finds humor, love, and joy. With a score that follows the span of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the early 70s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from moments of harrowing loss to those of poignancy and dark humor.

A journey into the centre of Hell; Dante's The Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustav Dore's wood engravings and animated by scratching directly into the surface of the film. 

Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation.  

"Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings.  I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings."
--Steve Reinke

Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, The Measures explores the metric system’s origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution. Along the way, Goss and Perlin consider the intertwining of political and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice.

China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to "be wired" and in turn, to be connected, in today's global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire--in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China--and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct.

A ship sets sail on an epic voyage through malignant natural and supernatural elements from which one man alone survives. An adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by19th Century wood engravings which are animated by scratching directly into the surface of color filmstock.