Final Artist Statement
Our assignment was to create a short nonlinear film using images derived from a song and focusing on color, and then removing the song and syncing abstract sound to the footage. I honestly had no idea what to do with this project or where to go with it, particularly because I lacked interest in the subject. After a few failed concepts, I came up with the idea to create a complication of various early 1930s cartoons to display to the class what one of my large inspirations of my work and being an animator is. I decided to use an electric swing song, which is a contemporary take on swing to parallel with my art, which I believe to be a contemporary take on the early 1930s comics and animations. The song itself is an instrumental remix of “Bella Belle” by the Noisy Freaks, originally performed by The Electric Swing Circus, edited down to about two minutes. For me the song conveys an upbeat wild party type feeling, but also a sense of the dark and surreal. This is similar to 30s cartoons which usually had upbeat happy characters and worlds that would on occasion contrast with surreal and nightmarish imagery. After collecting various cartoons, I began editing them together matching scenes to what I felt fit well with the song. My main goal was to use imagery of upbeat party scenes for the first half of the video and as the song progresses become wilder until switching to the surreal crazy imagery for the rest of the video. Afterwards I layered old film, scratches, different film reel beginnings and endings, and multiple burnings of film reels. I did this to emphasis the old worn look and the surreal/abstract feeling of the film. To be honest color was an afterthought, most of the footage was black and white to begin with except for a tiny bit of footage using recolored versions of the cartoons from the 1970s. I mostly used color filters over the footage, trying to use colors I felt fit with the mood the imagery created and added to the oddness, I also went back and overlaid some footage of abstract colors, which hopefully builds on the dreamlike nightmarish feeling for the piece. While the song-based version probably emphasizes the wild upbeat sensory, my sound piece hopefully highlights the surreal creepiness of some of the footage. I tried to achieve this by adding various old film reel sounds, countdowns, record playing, and other abstract noises. The second piece itself starts out eerily calm and slowly progress to a much darker abstractness near the end. Overall, I think the pieces are acceptable. I am not necessarily proud of either of them but am satisfied with the results. I feel they get the mood I was going for across and display my inspiration effectively. While I think they are edited rather well, I think the use of color in the pieces meets the minimum requirements, but definitely needs some work. This is most likely because the use of color was never intentional as it should have been, and instead incorporated last.













