CAPA Cilect Conference
I have been floored by the opportunities this last couple years have brought me. In whirlwind 5 day-trip, I flew to Brisbane Australia for the CILECT program— 2023 CAPA: Valleys Deep, Mountains High Conference held at Griffith University from Sept 21-22nd.
Griffith- CAPA Cilect Conference
I participated in Panel 4, where I presented my pre-production process for Amplifying Feedback Loop, breaking down the origins of the film, look and the trial and error within the process itself.
The film idea began after living in Shishmaref, Alaska for several years, and witnessing climate change’s effects more personally than ever before. I was fortunate enough to participate in a NASA/ GLOBE Earthsigns training workshop through the University of Alaska Fairbanks at this time in 2017, and learned just how interconnected each ecosystem is, and how the “positive amplifying feedback loop” builds and magnifies these warming effects with each cycle in each ecosystem being affected and intensified.
Getting going on this piece has been a start-stop process, which I believe is natural not only for myself but most independent filmmakers, and we often find the ends grows in the process of the making, instead of the idea conforming to the initial ideation. That being said, I crafted the work very strictly through
I also discussed some of the style tests and compositing techniques using multiple applications such as Procreate, Toon Boom Harmony, Adobe AfterEffects and Premiere to create moving holds and textures. I utilized both digital texturing, photographs, and scanned textures to ad depth to each frame and keep the visuals alive.
During this production, I have been finding myself drawn more and more towards tangible mediums and getting farther away from the computer— where possible. I have begun to be more driven to test things by hand, using under-the-camera techniques like I did in my younger years. The computer is a great tool, but I find all those isolating hours staring at the screen are driving me bananas!
Since the earth’s rotatin, the idea of cycles, and more was very important as a visual to return to and repeat as a motif in the film, I wanted to draw this into the work many times. However, I found that organic structures are much easier for me to do, than inorganic ones. Who knew drawing straight lines would be so hard?
So with these two concepts and problems in hand, I crafted a balsa-wood “greenhouse” structure, to animate via stop-motion in DragonFrame.
This was an interesting process, and my first attempts at green -puddy and clay to prop the green house up (in an attempt to green-screen out later) failed horrendeously.
With many thanks to the insight given from friend and stop-motion animator Bona Bones, I was able to procure helping hands and never looked back. Rigging several of these ball-and-socket grips (very reasonably priced), I found that I could. hold the structure aloft, and was able to utilize a green-screen underneath to create a very floaty, turning feeling in the structure.
Keying this bad-boy out was incredibly time-intensive, however— as there were issues with non-perfect lighting, and then the shiny-quality of the helping hands made this an over 12 hour process to key out one shot. Finally, compositing the forty-four “windows” of the structure was also time-intensive, as it was necessary to have the outside of the structure sit on-top of the composited earth as it rotated as well. Needless to say— this singular shot, while repeated in the film, took well over 40 hours to craft and recraft.
