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Short Film: ornana’s All Your Favorite Shows
All Your Favorite Shows! from ornana on Vimeo.
ornana’s latest short form outing, All Your Favorite Shows, might just be my favorite yet. Length notwithstanding, it features some of the most exacting and exhilarating editing you’re likely to see anytime in the near future, as it seamlessly shifts from film clips to Danny Madden’s original animation in the blink of an eye. I asked Madden to elaborate on his collaboration with editor Mari Walker in designing the film and stringing together its “found imagery”:
The clip selection began at the storyboards. I laid out these high energy action moments that followed as many modern film and television tropes as I could muster. From there, I called Mari because along with one of the walls of her apartment being filled floor to ceiling with DVDs, she’s got a remarkable (and sometimes frightening) ability to recall shots from almost any genre of film from almost any time period.
I would say something like, “Ya know how the hero will turn around and look over his shoulder all badass-like?” Then Mari would close her eyes for a minute, almost trancelike, and draft up a mental list of films and scenes where that sort of thing happens. Also, we had a couple nights where we invited over our other film geek friends to rack their brains and help us search for more clips. It really was an education going through films like that, dissecting the construction of camera moves and why and how they’d use a certain angle at a specific moment.
Then it was a lot of experimentation with clip duration and noting where your eye goes during the action. Sometimes we’d place some shots together, resizing them to fit smoothly into each other, and the stitch would look so clean that it was a bit eerie, having too much of a digital kind of perfection, so then we’d have to dirty it up to present it as more of a visual onslaught, which was the idea of the film in general. I like the idea of animating with found objects, this was like animating with found imagery.
