Tessa's first draft top

Re-edit after feedback from Rodolfo and Toto:

[What have you been making?]

During my time at the Lens Based Media course I began several projects from which one prominent work emerged, which is my short animated film: ‘a nightpiece for those who feel or felt like they were falling’. The work shows three iterations of the same fall of an undefined object (that moves like a cloth, or a piece of paper), and each iteration differs from the last in its pace and sound. It is shot on a stairwell and the object falls into the void underneath. There is a room at the top of the stairs with its door ajar, from which come the sounds of footsteps, kitchen-rumbling and the playing of a piano; revealing a human presence that we don’t get to see.

[How]

The repetitive structure of this work is something that originated out of practical reasons. I think it’s interesting that the efficient choices I make because of the restrictions of the software, eventually become artistic choices that shape how the final version of the film looks and feels. It reminds me of how people are shaped by their surroundings too, that they can’t always control: particularly their childhood and the houses they grew up in.

[Why (more personal)] (unfinishd!!)

The rooms in those houses provide the backdrop of my work. Sometimes it becomes the subject itself. The process of healing from traumatic events play a significant part in my current practice.

Relation to previous practice (draft from class 19th march)

I have been using the same medium in the past, the difference is that there was no specific end goal in mind, whereas here there was: it will be projected onto a flat surface and the spectator will sit in front of it. The way I approached the animation process changed a little bit as well. I think I applied the iterating structure also out because of its practical advantages: it is faster as I just have to adjust the speed and camera movements for each iteration. I like that the logic a software follows, influences my artistic choices, because it for me is reminiscent of how a person is interdependent and is defined by the world surrounding them. A base is already set, and it can get altered, making it organic. In the cinema there is a moment when it starts and a moment when it ends, as opposed to my previous installation works, where the spectator could walk in at any moment: meaning that the spectator is the one to start and end their experience. This doesn’t provoke questions such as: Do I have to remember this in order to make sense of the rest? What did I feel when the film started, and what do I feel now, and how will I feel after it ends?

What do you want to make next? I want to continue the narrative, or the suggested narrative, that has been established in my previous work, a nightpiece. To explore what could be happening behind the door. I’m setting this into motion by learning to play the piece by Chopin that I sampled for the film: I think that by learning this new ‘language’, it gives me some leeway to approach the film from a different perspectives. Practically, by knowing how to play the chords in which order, I can do it by myself and therefore have more control in future recordings, in terms of experimentation, rather than having to rely on sampling the recording of others playing it and editing that.

I guess I have no concrete plans with that, but I’d like to make room and set myself up for the evolving work that’s going to follow.