| Movie (wmv, 10.2 MB) |
Nicholas Bain
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Subject Listing - Multimedia
Advisor: Dr. Robert Silberman
Thursday, Oral Session 1, Presentation 1, Owen Hall 203
SHORT FILM: THE DYNMAICS OF PROGRESS
I've created The Dynamics of Progress for basically two reasons. The first is to raise awareness toward issues that I feel very adamant about. The primary issue is what I see as a mass waste of resources in the United States. My film aims to contrast different versions of progress. For instance the film contrasts the city train with giant oil refineries, barren urban landscapes with open desert, bicycles with luxury cars, aerial bombings with the smashing of an apple, and so forth. My aim here is to represent my belief that our intelligence carries the ability to create technologies that have the abilities to conserve energy and the condition of what I see as a struggling planet. I dedicated many scenes in order to attempt to display the sheer beauty of nature and also toward technologies that I believe have the ability to conserve our environments. The film insinuates that we have both the ability to destroy and conserve nature and that as individuals we have the choice to take action toward preserving or deteriorating. The second reason is to continue with the experimentation of the film art form. The five minute film consists of 125 scenes. While the film has a discernible beginning, middle, and end, there is no linear story. Instead the film displays these images in order to relate to one another. Some of these relations are somewhat obvious, others are not.
I created this film during the course of the spring semester of 2005. It was shot on 16mm, black & white film. The score for the film was composed by myself and recorded by a Phoenix based band, "Attack of the Giant Squid." The score is best described as ambient and minimal. The film corresponds with the action and mood of the film. It should also be noted that this film consists of about 20 scenes of stock footage. The stock footage I have used was created entirely by the United States government and this footage consists mostly of either war footage from the Middle East or stock from "social awareness" films created in the 1940s and 1950s.
I understand that many people will either not understand the film or simply see it as an art film. I do not expect people to make the relations as I have put them together; however, even if the viewer does not make these relations I'm confident that people will understand the overall concepts.
Advisor: Dr. Robert Silberman, Associate Professor, Art History, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN