Invited as a keynote speaker at the Future of Celluloid conference at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, as part of their Media Lab initiative, I was also afforded the opportunity to orchestrate a collaborative filmmaking production as a complement to the main conference and workshop programme.
As part of the conference, which was attended by key film academics from across India, I presented The Audience is Obsolete, A Swarm of Angels case study on collaborative production, and Burn, Hollywood, Burn, a primer to modern alternate moving image directions. Working with a group numbering in the mid-teens, I conducted a 10-day crash course in collaborative filmmaking practice and open content. The diverse team of post-graduates and accomplished artists had backgrounds in a range of creative disciplines, including filmmaking, music and fine art. Battling compressed time constraints, and a wide variation of knowledge in film practice, the creative outcome was nonetheless an accomplished effort featuring some outstanding cinematography, original music and script, with animated titles. The media produced was designed to tie loosely into the storyworld framework of The Ravages, A Swarm of Angels feature project.
The support and facilitation by the Faculty Staff and Media Lab support team, particularly Abhijit Roy, was most appreciated, and made it a challenging but immensely rewarding experience.
“The Media Lab team is extremely happy with the way you generated in the workshop new ideas about frontier video practices across the world. The way you, as the creative supervisor of the project, put together disparate ideas, sounds and images towards making of the short experimental video called The Screaming Wishes, is highly commendable. The participants of the workshop have been greatly benefited by your able guidance and, as they have communicated to us, are extremely grateful to you for connecting their talents to a global network of audiovisual practices.”
We presented a near-complete cut of the film (which is embedded) at a Media Lab screening, and I have been working toward enabling remixes of the project with the Lab, and Department of Film Studies.