DMS Student Showcase 2021

As we have all tried to move through the COVID-19pandemic, time has manipulated itself in a fascinating way. Instead of traveling to school or work, we are confined to our homes and some of the close locations around us. In this film, time is depicted as a cycle that not only follows a trend but gradually picks up speed. The purpose of rate of Changeis to show an insight into my experience with time during the pandemic. The daily tasks stay the same, wake up, go to work, drive home, complete school assignments, then repeat the cycle tomorrow. The film includes hard cuts and multiple camera setups, as well as an original synth backing tracking track to carry the scenes. Post visual effects are kept to a minimum with only a few exceptions in overlaps. As we continue into the future, perhaps we will be able to break from our own day today cycles.

This piece is a collage animation containing several paper cutouts of photos and text, including some cutouts manipulated in Photoshop for comedic effect. The piece visualizes a speech given by professional wrestler Scott Steiner during a promotion for “Total Nonstop Action Wrestling” event that took place in May of 2008, known as“Sacrifice”. The speech itself details Steiner’s ambitions to win a three-way match for the TNA World Heavyweight title against wrestlers SamoaJoe and Kurt Angle. He goes into immense detail on how the odds favor him and that“the numbers don’t lie”. The audio was recorded in one take, containing several errors, and thus the promotion and the speech became a running joke within the wrestling community before reaching broad appeal in internet communities. This piece is my take on creating a comical visual accompaniment that fits the chaotic audio it is paired with.

This short film is a collage animation inspired by the 2009 film,Coraline.Coraline is an animated film about a young girl who discovers a new world and must escape to get home. This collage animation used various mediums to tell the story in an interesting way. In the original film the antagonist was named The Other Mother, and her goal was to sew buttons on Coraline’seyes. In contrast, this collage animation uses other objects to symbolize specific characters and props in the movie. Coraline Collage Animation was inspired by the amazing work of director Henry Selick.

Have you also thought about what is our position in life, or the position of human beings in the universe? My idea is to insert the scene in the movie based on the material I shoot to express a kind of confusion and self-struggle through montage editing. For the shooting, I focused on preserving geometric shapes on the screen, which makes it more convenient for me to do masking layer when editing. The entire film, I chose to do black and white because it can make different resources look more unified in visual effects, and it can also increase the sense of mystery.

Burned is a stop motion animation created primarily through light. Using very slow shutter speed and drawing with flashlights and colored lights, the animation is brought to life to  create an abstract spectacle of imagery. Layered images, cutouts, and videos create a surreal atmosphere that plays into and takes full advantage of the stop motion medium. Thematically, the 2 minute piece tells a story of loss, reignition, and rebirth. 

From a directorial and creative perspective, Burned continues my and builds off of my experience with stop motion animation. It’s a technique that I’ve been using since I was only 11, back when the a feature for it was included in the Nintendo 3DS. Throughout my time as a Media Study major at UB, I’ve used the technique in a few other student films, but never with this light painting style. Being a very time intensive yet rewarding filmmaking method, it is a style I plan to return to, and possibly expand on the story and visuals found in Burned.

TISSUE is a short stop motion animation piece made with common household materials and my hand-drawn art on scraps of paper. It is the first-ever piece I have created with stop motion animation and inspired me to continue making more work in this style. The imagery used is meant to explore personal experiences with mental illness, particularly body dysmorphia and identity problems. This style of medium made it possible to breathe life and meaning into doodles and recognizable textures like cardboard and children’s letter beads. The audio of the film is an ambient mix made to shift focus and careful attention to the images on screen. The theme in the film is a difficult one and leads to a degree of vulnerability. This is why the up close and personal style of collage stop motion animation was perfect to communicate these complicated concepts in an almost intimate manner.

The idea behind this project was to introspect, ultimately down to myself. However, I wanted to, at the same time, expand, and act as an interrogator, asking the various characters,“Africa”, “The Fulani”, “Black Men”, and “Myself”, questions about faults, or fears of their possible doing. For “Africa”, the aim was mostly to question “White superiority” sentiments that many Black Africans hold, in the forms of worship, comparisons to success of White Men, and so on. Further down, you come to “The Fulani”, an ethnic group to which I belong to. Colonialism and the introduction of Islam from the north ultimately completely reshaped Fulanicultures to a point of being unrecognizable. The question of why the youth speak the language ofthe Oppressor, and former Colonizer, France, more than Pulaar, is mostly asking, “what happens to you and your culture when there are no longer any ties left?” Further in again, mostly aimed at“Black Men” (and partially the Black community as a whole), who have adopted forms of homophobia, misogyny, and abuse, such as beatings of kids, from Oppressors, asking the question of who they are becoming. And lastly, “Myself”, not only concerning myself with said issues, but left wondering, what will eventually happen to our People? A fear, I can’t run from

The point of this project was to help further put into question the image many Americans hold up in their minds of what the world thinks of them whenever “saving” them from dictatorships, or terrorism, and many more potential“threats”. Bees are a perfect way of communicating the American imperialist system, as bees fly to new places, and pollinate a new set of flowers, and eventually spread and colonize the region, forming their own hives in these areas. This issue of foreign policy is rarely enough brought up in American circles, however when it is, it's typically thrown onto the laps of republicans, most not realizing that the issue of imperialism is not a Democrat or Republican issue, or even solely an individual president’s, it is quintessentially American, quintessentially Western. What better way, I thought, to jab at that with a giant Attack on Titan/ King Kong-esque DonkeyElephant Hybrid that spits out its “DroneBees” (quite on the nose) off to “pollinate”(really just bomb) parts of the Southern Globe and eventually crumble under its own unsustainable weight?

This is a short experimental film of a series of magical moments by a magician. By swishing a magic want and casting a spell, times and spaces are transformed. With magic, the magician travels through teleportation with a particular device he made and sees what he changed and transformed through his power. Familiarness becomes distorted and transformed because of his power, which makes you feel both strange but intimate. Themain theme is focused on this phrase: magical moments happen in a blink of an eye. Speedy and repetitive gaps that give a sense of an old film projector bring you to instantaneous magical moments. Also, image collages will show a result of a magic spell, and the alternating appearance of Western and Asian women as they intersect will cause mysterious chaos. Through repetitive appearances of different moments, they present that you still sense a consistency although they are twisted. By layering and mixing energetic sounds, the film conveys an abstract atmosphere but intimate chaos simultaneously.

This is a short experimental film of a mysterious murder case in the fort during the war. A British soldier was killed by his friend, but for some reason, a terrified murderer tries to keep hiding this incident and to escape the camp. At the same time, the French sneak into the British base, and war breaks out, and in the midst of the hecticness, the murderer tries to sneak away. The location is the old fort located in Youngstown (near Niagara Falls and there are elegant and unique structures and objects in the buildings, which made me desire to explore this place and history. Through shooting various shapes and colors of windows, you can feel a sense of the 1975s, a period of French and British soldiers who arrived here and fought a territorial war. The exquisite harmony of sounds is based on multiple old war films, making you feel that this place is alive even though this historical place had already stopped being operated by soldiers.

I made this experimental short film about walking in nature and the things that I saw. I wanted to focus on things that stood out that you may not see on an everyday walk. My idea was to make it abstract so you could make your own story and read into it any way you want. I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t too literal and had room to be read into. The way I did this was by overlapping videos and adding blending modes to give it different textures and moods throughout. It has a sense of craziness but alsomoments where it calms down.

A wannabe filmmaker struggles to come up with an original story and even when he thinks he does, it turns out to be a movie that already exists. He locks himself in his room until he can come up with an original idea.I wanted to make a short film very badly this whole semester but didn’t have any good ideas. With the deadline approaching, I decided to just go for it and put everything that was going on with my life and turn it into a film. I got the idea of locking myself in my room from actually being sealed in my room when I came back to Korea last year due to mandatory quarantine. I am obsessed with Korean director ParkChan Wook’s films (Old Boy especially)and I have been trying to make films in my own style and wish to someday make something as iconic as his films. Also, I wanted to have full control of the lights for this project, so I bought a couple lights and shot everything night for day. Use of contrasting colors was on the list as well. The theme of this film is best reflected in the self-portrait that is shown throughout the film. I intended to not show my face in the same frame as the self-portrait until the story is almost over. It is what I feel like is going on inside my head when I get too carried away with myself and not realize that I am only repeating the stupid mistakes I have made before.

Fun fact: I had to go to the hospital at age 24 to get a piece of dumpling removed from my ear after filming

The collage animation is mostly made up of complementary colors that are meant to visually encapsulate its viewers. It mimics sound visualizations and music video effects. A more mature version of the piece is in “Flow”. Although it is only made up of stop motion, The added visual effects used in the piece allow it to flourish

Flow is a piece about getting into your flow state of mind. I got the name from the fact that I would zone out and draw for a few hours until it just started to flow out of me. A bit corny, but that is honestly why. It is a rotoscope animation mixed with stop motion accompanied by some added visual effects. There is around 700 frames worth of different drawings in the piece, each inspired by either contour drawings or things I enjoy in life. Feel free to pause during the sequences, the drawing range from very detailed to literal blobs.

This Is My World is an abstract short about the everyday interactions I have with nature and everyday items, only seen through the lens of an abnormal and dream-like perspective. Several shots of the outside world, such as the sun in the middle of a clouded sky, birds dancing in the rain and trees dancing in the wind become something supernatural as the texture and layers turn transform each image seen. This piece takes you out of your normal perceptions of what is seen and forces you to interact with them as contortions that leave the mind wondering "What am I watching? What is it that I am seeing right now?", and takes you into a trance with its simple yet captivating background noise and effects. This is the world I have lived in; what seems like minuscule encounters with nature and everyday objects in the midst of a pandemic, turns into something fascinating and obscure.

“Where Is My Mind?” is mainly composed of stop motionvideo using everyday objects and theirinteractions with each other. These objects have ahomely feel and a tie of childhood to them.These stop motion videos are contrasted with videosthat may suggest the stresses ofadulthood, showing that the fun times go fast andto enjoy them while they last. This balance orinteraction of video is why I chose the music, andtitle “Where is My Mind?”, because it showsmore of a focus on the fun things than the seeminglystressful ones. This suggests the answerfor the question we see in the title.