Thursday, 10 January 2013







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Tuesday, 8 January 2013




The final cut for my film. There are definitely some more corrections that could be done regarding the animation and pacing. But as it stands the level of detail feels homogeneous throughout, which is important I think. 

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Monday, 7 January 2013







The title of the film "Flattening of Affect" comes from psychology, and refers to the absence of emotional response in certain psychiatric patients. It is often a symptom of schizophrenia, but is also characteristic of psychopaths since it allows them to commit acts of violence with little or no remorse. I first heard the term when reading Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which the protagonist imposes a test called the Voigt-Kampff Scale on those suspected of being androids. To score low on this test implies an impaired empathic ability - or flattening of affect - and hence shows that they are not human, since empathy is mainly a human characteristic.

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Saturday, 15 December 2012

As  previously stated, one of the main aesthetics of this piece is flatness. I wanted to capture this firstly so that it could represent the flattening of affect shown by the character, but also because there is another manifestation of flatness within the narrative - the flattening of time. The aperture that opens between past and future collapses the distance between them, and I wanted a way to show this visually. That is why I decided to have small, two-dimensional shapes flash and spin around the opening, further establishing it as an other-worldly presence. This is also a link to my interest in abstraction, which is a process of flattening in itself. 

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Wednesday, 12 December 2012





The work of John Currin. His satirical paintings often present the beautiful as grotesque, using subtle compositions characteristic of a different era of painting. This allusion to the renaissance style helps make the the viewer expect beauty from his paintings, only to be isappointed by the weirdness they inevitably find. Currin's pieces also contain sexual imagery, and tend to make fun of social conduct and status. They stand  as a haunting, and sometimes disgusting pastiche of human behaviour.

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Tuesday, 11 December 2012


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Saturday, 8 December 2012

Priorities & Filming


Two lists. The top is a list of tasks I must do in order to complete the film. The underlined text denotes which shot I'll be working on, and the number denotes the prority. I arranged them according to what footage I have available and what needs most improvement. It looks like a lot, and may be rather hard to understand, but it's actually less than I thought I had to do. The second is a list of the remaining live-action footage to be shot. I'm doing that the day after tomorrow. All of it is written rather illegibly, sorry about that!

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