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 with a simple animation of abstract lines imitating the insects rummaging around to fertilize the plants.

Created during the pandemic, this playful film is a reflection on the importance of human connections to make this world enjoyable.

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 many afternoons spent watching insects flying from flower to flower and a favorite childhood memory of a comical Italian cartoon from the seventies called La Linea.

La Linea - the line, in Italian - is a film showing a real hand drawing a white line on a black background. From it a very expressive little man comes to life, its only purpose is to wander across the screen in search of adventures. 

The pictures describe an intimate environment, a closed entity during the confinement. The animation over it illustrates the mind exploring, mingling and dreaming. It’s the escape.

The title looks like a definition from a dictionary to play with the metaphor of the word pollinator with artist. Insects allow plants fertilization, artists provide us new ideas.

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

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.