Enoch receives a premonition of disaster, so he sets out to collect as many books as he can find, to preserve the knowledge of the world. But, lacking reliable divine guidance, all his careful preparations come down to a straight-ahead, all-or-nothing gamble….

format: DV video
software: Final Cut, Audition, Photoshop
Los Angeles, 2003.

Broadcast on CBC TV 2005.

This is a story about a little bird who claims to be able to predict the future. Don’t trust him.

The Little Bird of Disaster was developed at The Kitchen’s 2003 summer workshop. The speaking characters are real-time “video puppets,” controlled with Mark Coniglio’s Isadora software. The piece was actually performed, like they say, in front of a live studio audience (you can hear them in the background).

format: DV video
software: Flash, AfterEffects, Painter, Isadora, Final Cut, Audition
Los Angeles, 2004.

Screened at Rotterdam Film Festival 2005.

I’d seen pictures of it before, but an especially dramatic photograph caught my eye on a magazine cover in the grocery store. It almost looked like another vegetable: a brilliant marigold-orange “fuel-air” bomb, the most powerful non-nuclear weapon on the market.

format: DV video
software: Commotion, AfterEffects, Painter, Final Cut, Audition
Los Angeles, 2003.

In this adaptation of an early Kafka story, a soldier is taken prisoner in the night by a pack of jackals. Offering a pair of scissors, they demand that he use the makeshift weapon to kill his sleeping friends. They overwhelm his initial, shocked refusal. Slowly, incredibly, he begins to see their point of view. He takes the scissors, and…

format: HD video
software: Flash, AfterEffects, Painter, Final Cut, Audition
Montreal, 2005.

Screened at Ottawa Animation Festival 2005.

The painter in this short may think she’s only painting circles on the ground. But from our privileged vantage point, we can see well enough where it’s all going to lead….

format: DV video
software: Commotion, AfterEffects, Painter, Final Cut, Audition
Los Angeles, 2003.

I began to take a video camera out at night and peek into hundreds of other people’s windows, just for a few seconds at a time. I wasn’t sure quite why I was doing this…

format: DV video
software: AfterEffects, Premiere, Photoshop
Pittsburgh, 1999.

If you search for a needle in a haystack for too long, you start to get bored, then tired, then angry. If you get angry enough, you might even throw the whole haystack away, but then you’ve lost the needle forever…

format: DV video
software: AfterEffects, Premiere, Photoshop
Pittsburgh, 1999.

The letters used in this short fell off a movie theater marquee one Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1998. They’d originally been part of some grand, meaningful words, but now they were stranded and helpless. So I gave them a new home.

format: DV video
software: AfterEffects, Premiere, Photoshop
Pittsburgh, 1998.

Stoel III is a musical group based in Amsterdam. Its three members (Govinda Mens, Tilmann Meyer-Faje, and Peter van der Jagt) compose and perform musical pieces written for a very remarkable instrument: the folding chair. After years of practice, they can coax an amazing variety of sounds out of their instruments.

This short is a documentation of one of their practice sessions, in the basement of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

format: SVHS video
software: Premiere, Photoshop
Amsterdam, 1998.

Photographer Dafna Levy took a picture in 1992. It showed a cheerful yellow billboard bearing a syrupy poem about the beauty of mountains, something you scan quickly and break off reading about halfway through. It took me a minute to notice the barbed wire, and a minute more to realize where this photo had been taken…

format: DV video
software: AfterEffects, Premiere, Photoshop
Amsterdam, 1998.