"The Chimera Project Part 1: From Beauties to Beasties"

When: date
Where: venue

This is a no-budget and staged “bluescreen” video shoot, which will involve the live performance of volunteer participants recorded on videotape. In post-production, the edited footage will be composited with pre-recorded images of landscapes.

Ten to twenty selected participants (Ybor City citizens or Hillsborough Community College - Ybor Festival of the Moving Image audience members) will be invited to act-out or otherwise impersonate a ferocious animal, a mythological beast or favorite animal of their choice.

Participants will be videotaped using a variety of unconventional camera angles, from extreme close ups to low angle shots from below and hand-held moving pans.

Each participant will have a total of a one half-hour session; beginning with ten minutes to select and discuss their performance. The artist will come equipped with videotapes of Animal Kingdom and Discovery Channel as well as books and pictures of both mythological and natural animal images available for the participants to view as inspiration for their performance.

After a warm up and coaching session by the artist each individual will perform a pantomime live in front of the camera for up to five minutes. After the Ybor Experimental Festival the footage will be edited in Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro.

Background

A chimera is a mythological hybrid, part human, part animal. The cosmology of Ancient cultures such as Egyptian and Greece is populated with a rich pantheon of human/beasts composites. The most popular is the sphinx. The Sphinx and The Chimerae, according to ancient Greek myth, were the offspring of a horrendous monster Typhon and Echidna (who had a beautiful nymph's head and the body of a giant serpent). But now the word Chimera is associated with any number of fantastical or imaginary beasts.

By giving people a chance to act out their fantasy animals live on camera, "From Beauties to Beasties" challenges 21st century narcissism and our vain preoccupation with the re-presented image. We are keenly aware of the ubiquitous presence of cameras and addicted to technology's ability to exaggerate and stylize what we perceive as the infallable beauty of the human form.

By acting-out an imaginary Beast, the 21st first century Ybor Experimental Film Festival participant has the opportunity not only to let go their vanity and have a "blast", but to collaborate with the artist on the creation of new tropes.

Process

This is a process oriented and experimental video shoot which will be an intimate study of our ability and desire to communicate through the body. It will also create a unique mythology of human self-expression and will require a sense of humor and expressive abandon of ego from participants.

"As an artist I am interested in the capacity for the video medium to allow the individual artist to create new fictions, fairy tales, stories and histories," said Hall. "The digital video revolution now offers the film/video artists the ability to manipulate images through the use of compositing many images together into a single track."

"In past works I have pirated, borrowed, made-up and created a mythology of archetypes, goddesses, fragments and hybrids-using myself as actress, subject model to act out repressed aspects of the female psyche. The resulting images have to date been an ongoing composite of something new: a kind of chimera, part something recognizable from fairy tales, myth or popular culture, and part something I made up."

"The Beauties to Beasties Project is about making something up, and in the process, revealing something accurate about the collective human psyche."