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THE MESSENGER

Travelling from a distant galaxy, a winged horse arrived from a strange city. Within the inner sanctum a confrontation takes place with the animal overlord resulting in an amazing transformation. An allegory on change and rebirth.

Messenger, which was self funded, was my first traditional animation film - made with a wind-up bolex camera. and originally on 16mm film stock. The theme and imagery links to surreal drawings exhibited as an artist in New Zealand prior to arriving in Australia. It was completed in 1992.

I learnt a lot while making this film! Endurance. It took almost 2 years, between teaching hours, but there was actually 14 minutes of animation made, with only 7 minutes finally edited into the film. Much of what I shot was edited out for the sake of the story.
I wanted to make a film that spoke to the senses and the heart using just movement, shapes and music to tell the story. No dialogue.

I was entranced by the way the light cast shadows across the backgrounds as the creatures moved. It was made using collage, including pieces of magazine images and fabric for the backgrounds. Any computer with sufficient memory to attempt this for a 35 mm screening, was not accessible to me in 1991. But even now, I like the hands-on approach and am not really interested in super sophisticated computer animation. As an combined media artist I am drawn to a more raw result.

The animals were very difficult to control fluidly as it meant co-ordinating everything twelve or more times and shooting each of these moves twice to create one second of film movement. (24 shot frames make one second of animation) All the legs and wings and heads were separate pieces, so even a second of film took an incredible amount of time as I had to articulate each section in keeping with the appropriate movement for each animal. I was choreographing it all as I went. Sometimes the tissue paper wings moved out of place and I would have to re-shoot an entire scene.

Robert Moss's music was exactly what I needed for the background sound to tell the story. He later worked with me on Songs of the Immigrant Bride and Eclipse.

This film preceded Derrick Jarman's last film Wittgenstein when they screened together in Australia.

Jill Carter-Hansen