Making Tracks- live cinema

A little while ago my friend Erika Pál had the anim­a­tion she made for our MA show in Whir­li­gig Cinema’s Making Tracks fest­iv­al. She made record­ings of the students describ­ing dreams they’d had, and painstak­ingly created the anim­a­tion with oil paints on glass and time-lapse photo­graphy. Here she describes how she made it. She doesn’t have it avail­able to view online at the moment, so here are some stills from her website.

The idea was that a group of musi­cians, the Cabin­et of Living Cinema, would  be given some short stripped of their soundtracks, and they would compose a new one without hear­ing the origin­al. The new soundtracks would then be played live while the films were projec­ted. The filmakers them­selves wouldn’t hear the new soundtracks before the perform­ance, so it would be a surprise for them, and the even­ing would also be filmed for a dvd.

Erika was up first. They had left the narra­tion on her film, as it’s an intrins­ic part of it, but they added subtle foley effects. It really worked. My other two favour­ites were Amar- a film follow­ing a day in the life of a school­boy in India, and one categor­ising laughter. The music worked beau­ti­fully with the films, and the filmakers them­selves seemed delighted with the results in the Q&A after­wards. I really want to go to the next one.