IMAGE GALLERY

GHOST WORLDS (ANIMAL RITES)

(Expanded Cinema Performance)
Celebrate Super 8, Alchemy Film

and Moving Image Festival,
Auld Baths, Hawick,
Scotland, 4 May 2018

 

 

Ghost Worlds (Animal Rites) was a 25 minute long Expanded Cinema Performance, created by Avant Kinema for Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival's Celebrate Super 8 event at the Auld Baths in Hawick, May 2018.

The work featured live performance, two-channel moving image projections and a specially composed musical soundtrack by Avant Kinema and Undertoad.

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Intended to explore relationships between Humankind and the Natural World, Swan and Simian's contribution to the Celebrate Super 8 event was inspired by an interest in Animal Rights. Research for the piece included following the YouTube debates of such Vegan activists as Earthling Ed and Joey Carbstrong and bearing witness to many of the livestock cruelty videos available online.

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MOVING IMAGE
Ghost Worlds (Animal Rites) is an experimental hybrid of both digital and analogue filmmaking, presented as a two-channel projection or split-screen video.

 

The analogue sections make use of expired Kodachrome 40 filmstock, home-processed using the Caffenol recipe (coffee, washing soda, vitamin c) and handcrafted by directly scratching & painting the film. Super 8 footage was filmed on location throughout Scotland (Scottish Borders, Dumfriesshire, Perthshire, Ayrshire and The Orkney Islands).

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The digital sections feature digitally manipulated or distorted found footage clips of livestock and animal cruelty.

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SOUNDTRACK

The soundtrack is a collaboration between Avant Kinema (who also make music as The Bird And The Monkey) and Undertoad (aka Neil Coles, a Folk Musician & Psytrance exponent from Newcastle, also one-time friend and collaborator with Ozric Tentacles). Undertoad here provides the improvised Handpan phrases which act as a rhythmic and melodic underlay for Sarahjane Swan's vocals and Roger Simian's instrumentation.

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