Benjamin Gardner: I'm actually a
painter and I have a background in furniture
and woodworking.
But my sort of schooling was in painting and
drawing.
And so now I've kind of done sort of mixed media
installations and that is where filmmaking comes
from is a part of sort of these broader, bigger
mixed media installations that I'm working on.
Hallucination Dream Sequence is a film
composed of vignettes I would say and emails.
The emails are a conversation between two
people about sort of stages of going to sleep
and the sort of animated vignettes are drawings
that I made and used a process called data
bending to animate them.
Gardner: So I think the film here in particular
came from a bunch of different things but I was
mainly not getting enough sleep because I had a very
young daughter.
And so I started having sort of visual
hallucinations a little bit.
And so I started thinking about how I could talk
about that through images and no sort of static
image sort of would suffice.
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Gardner: My creative approach actually, it may be easist to
talk about it in terms of another film called La Jetee
by Chris Marker, which I think most people consider a photo
montage film. And so I was thinking about how to use
static images to tell sort of a story, maybe not narrative in
the traditional sense, but some sort of sequence of images that
I could tell a story with. The drawings and images are
generated by painting with gouache or using markers and ink
on paper and then I photograph the images using a DSLR camera
and import them into a music editing software called
Audacity and you can manipulate images in Audacity. So I used
sort of music effects to manipulate the images.
Yeah I do think I consider the audience and how they sort of
play into my work or how they view my work. And it's one of
the actually pretty interesting things about doing film that
is new to me in the sense that there is, to a certain extent
when you're making visual art, you can make it sort of
with some sort of understanding of what the viewer is going
to do but put it out there and there is this sort of blanket
acceptance of it being art. And filmmaking is different than
that.
And I don't ever know that I'll consider myself a full-fledged
filmmaker, but I certainly would like to understand that culture
and what people expect in terms of viewing films and how they
sort of contribute to Iowa or the city of Des Moines or
sort of on a broader national level.