Delirium 200610 mins DVD widescreen Working Methods My moving image work begins with a sense of place. Each story unfolds as a journey, initially improvised and unscripted, but always seeking an empathy with the locale before the lens. I might begin with a horizon, a lonely expanse, or a busy conurbation. My cues come from a world of fleeting impressions, always transitory and elusive. In creating a record of these, I attempt to tease out new ways of interpreting this world of flux. The results form a tension between visionary abstraction and the recognisable. In one sense each work embodies a purist concern with process, form, light and movement. In another, it seeks to make a connection with the viewer and the place, and find a potent meeting place for shared experience. Underlying all my work is the desire to constantly reappraise the notion of visual music . Can moving images be composed in a manner which parallels serial music, for example? Can form and motion be choreographed and observed as a pure aesthetic, distinct from the demands of story telling? I never work from a tightly prescribed brief, for fear that, when the film making process begins, it might not ring true to the moment and the place. Rather, I constantly seek out new strategies for interaction with the people and the environments involved, and connecting with the moment, in the moment. The process itself gradually reveals the themes, shape and structure of each new work. I often use stop frame animation techniques when recording events in a landscape. This allows me to bend and adapt the time frame and our perceptions of passing events. In this way still images can be transformed into serial and evolving progressions, with concern for dynamic surface and kinaesthesia. In Delirium, I built a portrait of inner city Brisbane using infrared, time lapse and closely worked montage. The use of infrared forced interesting constraints on the film making process. Each frame was exposed for at least 1/3 of a second, and colour was ‘implied' through post production. The resulting imagery had a trance like, hazy quality, which evoked a mood of agoraphobia and disorientation. In one sense the film became a diary of its own making, reflecting my own sense of dislocation and discomfort in the midsummer tropical humidity! I am very interested in collaboration with artists from complementary disciplines, especially those concerned with sound design, performance and written or spoken text. For Delirium, Matt Warren devised a monotone chant around the given text, an approach which seemed to perfectly match the mood of trance and meditation. |