Andrew Gingerich is a filmmaker whose work explores notions of family, dissociated identities, regional allegiances, and the boundaries of fiction. He lives and teaches in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
A weather anthropology: Distant voices animate doppler radar images of their cities as they discuss their lives and the weather for Sunday, November 5th, 2017.
Director’s Statement
I made this film as an exploration into the meaning of the weather. The way we discuss weather phenomena (as we so often do, over the phone, as a way of simulating physical closeness) is often abstract and analytical. When animated by the speakers’ voices as they discuss their personal experiences of the weather, the doppler images provide us with a more humanist data set.
A digital signage installation featuring programs of study at Western Iowa Tech Community College, produced with the help of my WIT Film & Media Production students.
The WIT Campus Technology department came to me with a really interesting project: they had recently acquired five Christie Microtiles, a bezel-less modular video display system often used to make large video walls, to experiment with their use as on-campus digital signage. These original Microtiles were based on the same DLP technology Christie used in their cinema projectors, and the color rendition was really remarkable. They had placed the tiles in a vertical housing to display a loop of video and still content with the unusually tall, narrow aspect ratio of 4 × 15. The tech department wanted to know whether the film program would like to produce any video content to feature on the screen. I brought the opportunity to my students, and they decided that we should create some short video loops featuring some of the programs of study that WIT offered.
Producing content for this display presented some really intriguing challenges. Not only did we need to capture tall, narrow video (a feat we accomplished easily enough by mounting our FS700 sideways, but we wanted to be mindful of the seams where the screens met—there was no bezel, but there would be narrow lines interrupting the image. Beyond that, we needed to develop a visual language that made sense for this aspect ratio and installation. Composing visually interesting shots that made use of the full height of the column forced us to think very differently from the way we approached composing shots for a horizontal frame. Because we thought camera movement would be disorienting to people glancing at the column as they walked past, we opted for a totally static camera for all of our shots.
I built an After Effects template and directed the first program video (featuring our own Film and Media Production program), and once we were able to determine that everything was working according to plan, my students each picked a program of study, shot footage, and edited it into the After Effects template. The resulting videos were looped on the video column, which was placed at the main entrance of the college to greet visitors and students.
My role: Co-Director/Cinematographer/Editor
A short film in the style of a ’70s thriller trailer.
A mysterious, malevolent forehead from the seventh dimension is wreaking havoc on the lives of innocents. It can make phone calls, and move lamps with its mind. Even if you escape, you will NEVER! be the same.
Director’s statement
I have a great fondness for the sorts of trashy thrillers I used to see advertised at the beginnings of heavily-worn Blockbuster videocassettes. Call to Forehead, made in collaboration with Vincent Gagnepain, was our homage to these cheaply-made, overwrought genre movies.
In order to best emulate the particular texture of such trailers, we shot on 16mm film. Our graphics were designed using only techniques that would have been cheaply available at the time, and incorporated the distinctive jitter of a low-quality optical printer. The final edit was routed through a period VCR to introduce a soupçon of analog smearing.
