I’ve wanted to make some fun, experimental short films for a while now. Nothing with a literal narrative story, just abstract motion pieces. Visual poetry. I’ve wanted to play around with this idea for long while now, but something else always comes along that seems more important.

So in the past few weeks I decided to simply dive in. But of course in my scattered way, I ended up making little bits for a bunch of short films, instead of committing to getting one going. Normally i’d be mad at myself for this, but now i’m realizing that it’s just who I am as an artist. A scatter-brained multi-passionate tiger can’t change his stripes.

On my phone I have this app called FotoDa. It’s a digital photo collage app, that pulls images from your phone camera album and mashes them together. Any time I have downtime I end up generating a handful of fun collages.

I started going through my backlog of the collages and seeing how I could bring them to life with motion. They seemed abstract enough for me to not get caught up in story.

I have a bunch of other apps in my phone that I can run images through, some distort them, some are more like filters. So that was my next phase, send the phot collage through some of these other weird apps.

Then I wanted to make a real media piece of art. Something fun and mixed media. Stencils, torn paper, stamps. Whatever I had.

So far I really like this approach. Like little bits of raw material that will eventually turn into a fun little abstract film. But the next step is to try to find some concrete imagery. A character, and environment. Something that the viewer can connect with.

This piece already feels like it belongs in a desert. So I guess the next step is to figure out what kind of short abstract story I can tell in that location.

Wish me luck!