Dylan Wright
When I was learning geometry my teacher told me something that stuck with me. She
said that you can picture a perfect circle in your mind, but no matter how good of an artist or
mathematician you are, you will never be able to recreate that perfect circle in reality. The closest you can achieve is an approximation. I was reminded of this while trying to scratch a square into black leader. Each square was individually messy, barely a square, but when projected, would hopefully be enough to create the approximation of a square in the mind of the audience.
In filmmaking, you can never really achieve a perfect representation either. Even the most grounded of documentaries is still beholden to the perspectives of the filmmakers. What is
left out of the frame says just as much as what is included. When you see a video or film of a tree for example, you are not really seeing that tree, you are seeing someone else’s perspective of it, which only gives you an approximation of how it actually exists in reality.
This film was made by combining 16mm footage I shot around Central Park and the
shared senior seminar studio with rudimentary animation made by drawing and scratching on the film itself. The combination of abstract and simplistic figural imagery with realistic footage is meant to call into question the dichotomy between reality and imagination, and whether any
thing we actually see can actually be recreated fully.