4K Film Projects
Over the last several years I have created six short films in 4K resolution for large-scale projection. I originally made my living with a camera as a filmmaker, so this current work is something of a return to my roots—a chance to rekindle and build on my skills in the making of moving imagery.
But the more immediate impetus was a commission I did for the Boston Symphony Orchestra in its Boston Pops mode.
I produced a montage of my landscape images that was projected on a forty-five foot screen above the orchestra during two live performances in Boston Symphony Hall. The music was Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World”.
As an outgrowth of this experience, the first of the new films is edited to the lyrical Largo, or slow movement, of the Dvorak symphony. It is twelve and a half minutes in length and expands the Boston montage to include new work—107 landscape images in all.
The project is created in 4K resolution to take advantage of the high level of detail captured in my 4″x5″ film transparencies. 4K is the standard for digital projection of feature films in commercial cinemas. The resolution is roughly four times greater than that of full high definition television.
The other five films, also in 4K resolution, are short, animated pieces built from abstract elements. Some of these come from my camera-based work. They run three to five minutes each and have music tracks by twentieth and twenty-first century composers including Bela Bartok, Dmitri Shostakovich, Arvo Pärt, and Charles Mingus. The music is timed to and reinforces the moving visual images.
One of these five pieces features spoken dialogue. It weaves 127 everyday sayings and figures of speech into a fanciful word play—an allegorical narrative that reflects on the tug-of-war between life’s triumphs and reversals and the uncertain nature of our self-perceptions.
The six-film series is intended for immersive, large-scale projection in an installation that also features framed landscape photographs and prints of my camera-based work hanging in a conventional gallery outside the darkened cinema space.
