VCUarts had a strong presence at the 2012 James River Film Society’s Shorts screening, with a number garnering awards!
First Place: L. City, by fall 2011 Kinetic Imaging Visiting Artist, Sandro Del Rosario
Del Rosario is currently a visiting professor at the University of Richmond. He says “I had a wonderful experience teaching in the Kinetic Imaging Department at VCUarts during the Fall 2011, and I still feel very connected and nostalgic about the school.”
L.City is a 16mm, black and white, experimental film made with cutout photographs, objects and drawings animated frame by frame under the camera.
Originally released in 2002, L.City has been published in a DVD anthology by Rattapallax in 2006 (The Cabell Media Library had a copy).
Short Synopsis:
A man remembers his lost love through suggestions and atmospheres of a city. Like lines of a poem, images, music and sounds reflect an interior state of mind, with the disrupted, non-linear structure that remembering can have.
Second Place (tie): Alphabet, by Kinetic Imaging BFA student, Sean Ruecroft
In addition to his film award – has received a Benjamin Gilman International Scholarship. He will be attending The Bristol School of Animation at UWE (The University of the West of England).
Third Place (tie) Eye Pieces Number 1, by Graphic Design faculty, Steven Hoskins
Synopsis: Eye Pieces, Number 1, 2012, 4:50
“You are watching this: a look, a stare, gaze, glimpse or simply a glance, broken apart and asynchronously re-assembled over 4, 16, and 64 individual split screens, mimicking bird chirps and wind chimes in the out-of-doors. First in a series of eye movement studies.”
Hoskins’ Artist Statement
I have spent most of my life as a graphic designer, and recently as a graphic design educator who teaches and practices in video. Much of this work is imbued with formal/visual explanations for the Hermeneutic Circle: the understanding of meaning derived from interrelationships between part and whole. This is embodied in the video image that is broken and reassembled; fragmented and reconstituted; a union made of asynchrony. Chaotic and irregular movements converge into unified movement; small multiples begin to move as a system.
Third Place (tie) Movements, by Photography and Film student, James Mattise
Movements is what became of my introduction to the Optical Printing machine. The images within the film were composed of various, individually filmed, images layered on top of one another. Local musician, Nick Bonadies then elegantly married the images with a score that allowed the image’s abstractions to blend into a balanced, fully realized experience.
Best Virginia Filmmaker AND People’s Choice award: Evolution!, by Kinetic Imaging alumnus Tyler Rhodes and the Patrick Henry School of Science and Art
Films were selected through a jury panel, with guest juror filmmaker Lyn Elliot selecting the award winners. Lyn is a Film and Media Arts professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Rhodes says “This is a collaborative animation in which I took 5 groups of people and simulated evolution with them in the course of an hour. From those groups I amassed about 460 drawings, which, along with their “animal noises,” I then turned into an animation. This animation here involves the group from Patrick Henry School of Science and Art and is roughly 100 or so of their creatures, with their own unique ending to the animation- the Ice Age.”
Image: Still from Del Rosario’s L. City