Helped to produce some very elementary promotional collateral for the recent edition of the Intervention party series held at Projector X, with a theme of all things evil eyed. The sushi piece was a test, but the absurdity of the images is reward enough as I cackled away at my computer.
In a bid to follow the national narrative of upskilling oneself, I've been entirely ensconced in the gridlocked world of Maya 3D in the past few months, with a few silly game levels and strained wrists to show for it. It's been wild seeing that I could barely figure out corresponding buttons on the mouse, in the beginning, to actually making game levels that made the testers swear. Well, at least one of the testers.
Yet my favourite output from Maya 3D is still one of the first tasks I did, even at the risk of looking crude: the room of a gargantuan cat marking its territory, just because it answers unexpectedly to the theme of "Living Room".
Each time I plug away at Maya also brings back the time I sat or rather 旁聽 in other people's animation class, trying to learn Blender in Chinese instruction back in Taipei, and a lovelier memory of my only friend in the Animation major offering assistance, unasked.
雪中送炭 moments were far and few between and even if names fade, I remember their beauty shining through. And every time I open up Maya, I'll always think of her.
When you recognise the last bit of magic that winds down the film when the final pairing - the musicians - say, "Let's start tuning" and this documentary of cable car polyglossia hums with the variegated strains of generations, histories, locales and even genus to its very end.
"As we built the film, we thought in terms of binary propositions: portraiture/landscape, nature/culture, man/animal, East/West, speech/ambient noise. Maybe the film makes an experiential claim that culture is a moving target, but it’s a moving target locked inside an enclosed box."
For more: a Film Comment interview with Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez
