Film Categories: Sound Art + Music

  • Our Protection

    “I’m watching you watching me, watching you watching me, watching you watching me. You hit bodies, while we hit streets, say it’s for our protection, when was just your decision” “Our Protection” is a music video for the band LAL for their 4th CD release. The song and the video are inspired by the G20 protests of 2010 in Toronto. Animation, mixed with real time photo and clips of protests, protesters, police violence and LAL, gives you a glimpse into the reality of loss of civil liberties we are facing more and more. Soon we won’t be allowed to dance…

  • Gay Goth Scene

    For a young boy school is a living hell. He decided to put an end to it. “Gay Goth Scene“ is a mixture of short film & music video, that deals with a worldwide social disease: bullying.

  • Dependent

    An estranged couple meets one last time to decide the fate of their relationship. Featuring James Bunton, Regina the Gentlelady, Jeff Harris, Owen Pallett, Katie Ritchie and Judy Virago.

  • Hoshi Neko (Little Star)

    This 16mm B&W cut-out animation borrows narrative tropes from early Atari video games, silent films, and anime cartoons, offering a weird story and hybrid aesthetic. The narrative is based on the imagined adventures of the singer’s lost cat, Hoshi. Hoshi eats a koi fish, who emerges angry from his digestive system. The koi enlists the help of a pug to exact revenge, and the three characters embark on an epic chase through the cosmos. Their journey brings them through wormholes and across poisonous planets where their skin is melted off by acid rain.

  • Championship

    At a wrestling tournament, a young competitor faces match upon match. Referees converge on the scene. The crowd’s attention wanes and focuses with the intensity of the bout. Sounds drift in: a psychic piano enters over fast and short breaths. This is a contest of past and future. It will be decided in the ring.

  • Axis

    Axis is an experimental film made through entirely photomechanical and photochemical means. The film fits into the experimental sub-genre of “optical printer film.” Some practitioners who have inspired me include Jordan Belson, John Whitney, David Rimmer, Pat O’Neill, Al Razutis, Gary Popovich, Bruce Elder and Norman McLaren. Axis takes as its subject matter the mundane, faceless urban landscape with its gleaming towers and factories. The workaday humdrum… drones to the hive. So I take to the streets, with my homemade Bolex robot, affectionately known as “BOLBOT.” It is a time-lapse motion control machine capable of smoothly spinning through X-Y-Z axes…

  • Film Concerto in Hanging Major

    As the heartbroken Papageno from The Magic Flute is on the brink of ending his life, we pause to examine his options. “Film Concerto in Hanging Major” is a highly informative, yet darkly humorous, guide into the most effective ways of committing suicide.

  • This Film Has No Commercial Value

    Film made by John Kneller with a sound design by John Shipman. It focuses on the environment using time-lapse cinematography as a means to capture phenomena that is impossible to see with the naked eye. Automated pan, tilt and zoom mechanics were custom-built by the filmmaker to augment the time-lapse techniques. The resulting imagery is a hyper-reality of landscapes transformed by means of the camera’s mechanical mediation. The sound design was created from naturally recorded sound phenomena and musical performances. The Romantic musical elements are reminiscent of lyrical depictions of nature and environment. The deliberate mediation of the sound and…

  • Synaesthetic Anesthesia

    Synaesthetic Anaesthesia is the product of many long years, experimenting with optical printing, travelling mattes, high contrast manipulation and other film specific techniques and processes. The optical printer is used to manipulate archival imagery from the colonial era, forming a layered tapestry with contemporary images of landscapes, architecture and phenomena. By means of montage and optical recombination the film takes these historical fragments and builds them up to a frantic pitch. The film seeks to depict the frenetic digital information age but entirely through traditional photomechanical methods, a reversal of the norm. The sound design enhances the film’s transformations, and…

  • The Alicorn

    The film takes the form of a three-tiered hallucination: a dream within a dream within a dream. A pharaoh time travels from the future to ancient Egypt and dreams of a medieval tavern where people are suffering from the Black Plague. In the tavern, on the brink of death, an old crone tells her life story. The woman’s story, narrated in old English song, alludes to her salvation by the appearance of an alicorn borne by her younger sister. Themes of women’s stories, power, and transgression are woven throughout the narrative.