Defying Extinction
16mm, 51 minutes, colour and black and white, 2015
Directed by Rania Al Harthi, An An, Dianne Ouellette, Gerald Saul and Ken Wilson. This was created in the"Analog Film" graduate course in the summer of 2015. It was shot with approximately 3500 feet of short ends and left-over film in my supplies and was all hand processed in a darkroom using buckets.
While no script was ever really written, on the second week of the course we decided to use dinosaurs as a motif. Dianne had two dinosaur masks from Universal Studios gift shop, and many toy dinosaurs were also used. Much of the project consists of 100 foot self contained films featuring dinosaurs doing some simple action such as mowing the lawn, barbequing, busking, sword fighting, or trying to drink coffee. In the final week, I created book end scenes featuring William Bessai-Saul as a paleontologist who finds a beacon which draws the dinosaurs back to earth from their space ship. Other title cards suggest this William's character, Doctor Skrimguard, is continuing to fight the dinosaurs throughout the film as the dinosaurs go from content to agitated to angry.
The dinosaur motif seemed appropriate in the context of this being an analog film project, a form which is being seen as archaic and even extinct.
Program notes from preview screening.