A production still from Dillon Markey's "Over the River and Through the Higher Dimensions"
This year’s edition of the Slamdance Film Festival is featuring a trio of animated shorts by Calartians: Deux Regards, by Minkyu Kim (Film/Video BFA 09) and Kang Min Kim (Film/Video BFA 09); Visit, by Kang Min Kim; and Over the River and Through the Higher Dimensions, by Dillon Markey (Film/Video MFA 09). All three are being shown together on Tuesday, the 26th.
Deux Regard explores “the interstice between materiality and immateriality, where direct work on the filmstrip is digitally rendered to create tension between surface and depth,” say the filmmakers.
Visit is a solo effort by Kang Min Kim chronicling a phantasmagorical journey through a city. For Kim’s protagonist, “the city is sinking in a dream, with flicking segments of real life and illusion,” he says. “The only lighthouse he has is his memory.”
Minkyu Kim graduated from Program in Character Animation and Kang Min Kim from the Program in Experimental Animation. Both have gone on to MFA programs in the School of Film/Video, Minkyu to the Film Directing Program and Kang Min continuing in Experimental Animation.
Over the River and Through the Higher Dimension is Dillon Markey’s whimsical exploration of the nature of the universe as it is becoming understood in cosmology today. The film, Markey’s thesis project at CalArts, uses live action and a variety of animation techniques, including stop-motion wire sculpture, an Etch-a-Sketch animator, CGI and a full-size stop-motion cast “puppet” of Markey’s own head. In the story, Markey is given a teleportation device by his grandmother and travels to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, with the puppet representing Markey’s dimension-crossing self.