Pollinator Film

In July 2020, I collaborated, on an hour live broadcast performance, with the musician Briggan Krauss, improvising on guitar over my film.

The video is a combination of images from a garden and surroundings, overlapped with animated abstract lines, evoking the rummaging of insects propagating pollination that allow fertilization of plants.

Similarly, my goal in this whimsical film, was to engage a reflection on the natural and necessary human connections that we have been deprived since the pandemic. 

The original film is an eleven minutes loop of a series of nature snapshots taken with an iPhone. The overlapped abstract white line drawings are originally handmade using black ink. The editing of the film was done with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Watch the 11 minutes animation.

The idea came from a combination of watching insects flying from one flower to an other and the hilarious Italian cartoon, La Linea. Each one doing their propagation job in their own way.

La Linea - the line, in Italian - showed a real hand drawing a white line on a black background, generating an animated character who’s life purpose was to wander across the screen in search of adventures. 

The series of images are from my intimate environment, a closed entity during the confinement. The animation over it illustrates the escape, the mind mingling, exploring and creating.  

The design of the title simulates a dictionary. The introduction text represents the definition, but I exchanged  the words “pollinator” with “artist”, and “pollen” with “ideas” to convey the poetic concept of artistic transmission.

"Pollinator" is a metaphor for artistic transmission. Artists pass ideas from one another like animals to plants, allowing fertilization.

The improvised music flies over the film, like a pollinator itself.  

Watch the 45 minutes live performance.

Live broadcast, July 25th 2020 in Brooklyn NY. Presented by Connection Works, Me, Myself and Eye. Curated by Michel Gentile.