Pitch Sketches
Eye pitch sketches
<Shinyoung's writing>
The world is on the loop of structuring and demolishing.
Human beings have been struggling to live in an ideal world with ambition. Those efforts and struggles have initiated with human’s natural desire to exceed the limitation of current society and to realize the ideal society: Utopia. Through our history, numerous theories toward utopian society have been adduced by thinkers and politicians throughout the East to West. Confucius emphasized a society performed by human agents and embodying the civilized and cultured patterns of behavior developed through generations of human wisdom. Lao-tzu believed an acknowledgement of the natural law against to an artificial environment which makes people behave badly. In Western philosophy, Plato, a Greek philosopher, claimed that “philosopher kings” should be the rulers of nations to realize justice ruled by knowledge. Utopian society was characterized by egalitarian principles of equality on government, economics, religion, sexual and other factors, reflecting the spirit of Renaissance-Humanism. Since the 20th century, Ideology, a structure of Idealism which explains human world and modifies it, has been emerged in many different forms. Marxism aimed to collapse hierarchical society by prohibiting private property against capitalism, and Anarchism advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary institutions in order to hold the state of equal and free from any oppression. Those ideologies are seen as a part of revolutions for claiming the equal. However, limitations were faced to realize admirable equally world with this single theory. If revolution theory is scientific, there would be a definite answer. Yet, revolution is not a predictable science, therefore, unavoidable variable matters are occurred. The most fatal matter people did not recognize was all human beings are greedy animals which never fulfils their satisfaction. This is a driving force toward the ideal society to overcome current limitation and also the most decisive factor which destroys their ideal society. Human wishes to accomplish a world without capitalism, yet human nature is c ompletely capitalist. In addition, human growth engines are hindered when equality and freedom reach a certain standard. As the history shows, eagerness for better world have structured the current society; nevertheless, it is the eagerness which also demolishes the world. The world is structured by ambitions of human who is eager for better world, and the world is destructed by the ambitions.
Sal's writing: 1050 Kilometers is a leporello photobook documenting portions of the barrier between the U.S. - Mexican Border. The images were taken along various border towns and cities in Mexico, including Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, and Matamoros. Behind the images, numbers and figures give the reader a sense of the human scale of migrants who must cross difficult terrain, evade capture, and risk their lives to reach their unlikely Promised Land.
As the pages are folded out, the book becomes an uninterrupted wall; a symbolic representation of the sprawling network of barriers, border patrols, sensors and drones employed by the U.S. to keep undocumented migrants out. As a tool and symbol of the American effort to keep out undocumented migrants, the wall has become an irresistible politicized canvas for Latin Americans. Political and utopic murals sit side by side the sanctioned advertising and warnings. Most strikingly, crosses placed on the wall have become a common site, set there to remind us of the 10,000 migrants who have died attempting to cross.
1050 Kilometers conveys the sense of impenetrability and monolithic scale of the barrier faced by Latin American migrants every day. Gazing upon these images, we cannot help but imagine what is hidden from our view beyond the wall. As the barrier continues to expand, the stakes are raised for migrants; the humanitarian crisis deepens as we watch these walls reach higher and farther.
Ewan's Writing: I declare a thumb war
I declare a thumb war be a historical reenactment of a found photograph, set in a dystopian alternate reality.
The photograph being reenacted is an absurd image made during the Iraq war of an American soldier engaging in a thumb war with a native teenager. The film will consider post-colonial narratives in relation to contemporary neo-colonialism with specific reference to the so-called War on Terror.
Elements of the source material will be decontextualized in order to challenge the viewer to consider the universality of certain power structures, specifically regarding western involvement in foreign countries. This will be done through creating characters and place that avoid specificity. The soldier will wear camouflage without any insignia that could indicate a particular army. The outfit will be made up of a mixture of different western military clothes. The action will take place in multiple time zones. The foreground will be in real time and involve the repetitive thumb war between the two characters, whereas the background will be a cyclical time lapse of a day. The soundtrack of the work will be appropriated from NASA’s ambient sound recordings of the Sun.
<<mike>> Rolling Coal is an animation based around a subculture of diesel truck enthusiasts, who modify their trucks so that an excess of fuel can enter the engine and produce massive volumes of black, sooty, smoky exhaust.
Rolling coal is a physical embodiment of troll culture. It is intended as an act of defiance of environmental regulations and intended by conservatives to infuriate liberals by aggressively blowing into the faces of protestors, cyclists and hybrid car owners.
It is a highly theatrical and provocative action that is emblematic of many strains of conservative American ideology. A sacrifice of non-renewable resources to the Gods of American free-speech.
Rolling Coal will be a 3d animated short film, featuring extended sequences of complex physical simulations of smoke emitting from tricked-out slickly rendered models of diesel pickup trucks.
The animation is intended to appeal to both audiences that would view it as horrific or awe inspiring.
//Dorothy// Letter to the Outsiders
Letter to the Outsiders is an essay film that investigates the perception of prison, and human condition in a confined space from a personal point of view.
The film documents a series of journeys to repurposed prisons in the Netherlands. Accompanying with a voice-over reading out an unsent letter to an anonymous person, the film creates a set poetic imagery with static and long take scenes. It presents multiple meanings and tensions of these spaces by taking prison as a real space, and a metaphor of confinement. 5 years ago, before the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, I have written the script for the film Pseudo Secular. One protagonist is an activist in prison who writes a series of letters to her boyfriend. Having political prisoner in Hong Kong was still unimaginable at that time – and it only becomes a reality again only after more than 16 activists were being sent to jail in 2017.
This film as an indirect response to this imprisonment of activists, ponders issues of fear, freedom and diaspora as a universal human experience. It is also a personal therapeutic journey to overcome the fear of uncertain political situation right now at home.
It invites audience to be actively involved to read and feel these spaces on different levels, as well as contextualize it with their own experience. While watching the film within the cinema space, the film would like to provoke thought on how human perception on space are being disciplined and shaped – and if there is a way to break away from these rules around every one of us, no matter where we are.
//Henrietta//
Dance of solidarity
100 ways of showing solidarity, something stinks around it,
---What my audience is looking for? ////Why my work is an answer?
Duration: 15 minutes
Musicians: 3 male, 1 female, on casio keyboards, in grey cotton dresses, with long brown wigs.
Live performance with four musicians on keyboards, in wheelchairs, demonstrating a new genre of music. This small group of musicians represent an audio-visual performance how our society reacts to solidarity.
In which contexts are we using the word “solidarity”? [S: what do you mean by that? What do you WANT from it?], how are we practicing it, which colours are we seeing, what kind of music or tune are we hearing, what is the food of solidarity? Why I’m outside of my own solidarity? Individuals are aloud to feel solidarity or just communities? It is painful to feel solidarity?