Digi-EYE

On Friday I went to a festival compilation of digital film works by undergraduate film studies students at OSU, with several DAIM (graduate digital animation students) pieces thrown in. I was blown away by the films by the undergrads - their pieces were amazing. I loved the humor in the pieces, and the compositions they have created. I thought they all paid really great attention to sound as well. I recognize some of the students from a film studies class I took as well. I loved the music and the beat of Cotter's piece All Your Light (Times Like These). I also loved that everyone LOLed at Renee's Buried Unicorn. I think her film is universally identifiable because tuition debt is something that can weigh on a person and kill their spirit. I also loved Seth Radley's Cinemagraphs: An Experiment. I thought it was very creative. All of Tom Heban's pieces (Heblog) were great, although I have seen most of them before as he is a fellow graduate student in our department. Katherine Stevenson's Good Deeds was absolutely hilarious. I also really liked David Goodwin's pieces, Absence and Interstice as they were serious and reflective.

I was, however, disappointed with the politics involved with this exhibition. I think that the DAIM students' works were thrown in last minute. I was a little disappointed considering my pieces were thrown out of the lineup, even though my name and picture were present in the title sequence for the event. This is fine, but some of the animated works that were REALLY GREAT were also left out, like Sheri's piece. I also thought that Janet Parrott threw her work in to the mix with Ordinal 5, which was a little out of place considering it was a students' film festival. I thought her piece, about dance and the number 5, could be improved. The math didn't line up to what the dancers were doing (there were 7 dancers?). That piece was long and drawn out compared to the students work. The students utilized things like suspense, dialog, composition, tempo and all sorts of other devices to get the viewer engaged. Her piece, did not engage at all. It was academic-sounding and not engaging. There was no hook, no climax. The dancers were wearing weird leotards and were kind of creepy - they looked like extremely tight black and white spandex parachutes. I also thought it was discourteous that her piece was 8 minutes long, the longest film in the festival, whereas one of the works I submitted were ten seconds long. I think that some more digital animators pieces could have been used in the showcase instead of hers, like Sheri's Cinderella piece. Also, Ann Sofie Clemmensen's work The Laws of Jante utilized dance just like Ordinal 5 and was engaging. She utilized timing, repetition, intertitles and an old-timey black and white silent film style that worked with her subjects. Overall it was a great event, I just think that parts of it were pieced together last minute and that the DAIM submissions were widely underrepresented.