Keyword Geometric Shapes

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.

A visual and musical elaboration on the Crab Canon in which the theme of intersecting beams is played against itself going backwards.

This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.

Shot in Southern England over the course of six weeks by a crew of three American filmmakers, CircleSpeak offers a nuanced look at the passions and beliefs of the people immersed in the crop circle phenomenon during the season of 2001. This feature-length documentary presents interviews with serious “researchers”, self-proclaimed “hoaxers”, local farmers and villagers who are all, in one way or another, involved in this strange and compelling summer spectacle taking place year after year.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

A filmed exercise that follows in the path of Rotating Cubic Grid and Cubits, the predictably titled Cube features cubes of varying shapes and size sliding around and growing into and out of one another, demonstrating how multiple parts can make up a whole.

Yumi Shima's animated short film is an experiment with geometric objects.

Rhythm and repetition plays an important role in the animated film Allahu Akbar by Usama Alshaibi. With this film, Alshaibi questions the confrontation between tradition and modernity by drawing inspiration from geometric motives of Islamic art. The artist offers a re-interpretation of these motifs through computer animation. By turning the shapes in different direction, new images are generated, freeing them from their fixed state. Traditional spiritual values feed the present and open up to a modern perspective.

A tribute to the Masters of Middle Eastern Patterns. NOOR is 4D animation of classical design motifs and calligraphy from Arabic, Persian, Moroccan, and others. Inspired in part by British scholar Keith Critchlow's 1976 scholarly book "Islamic Patterns" and by my pilgrimage to The Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

An attempt to visualize higher dimensions and unearthliness, taking into account these concepts' heightened awareness, when attempting to process or predict the end of the world.

An abstract pursuit that leaves you gasping for breath.

Music: Carl Stone. Colored pen-and-ink drawings, like topological maps of biomorphic objects, grow and evolve from the red star. Once the master image is formed, this continuously throbbing, pulsating sight is used to ring changes based on years of optical work. Music and picture work together to create a mood of ecstatic tranquility. The bright colors, beautiful music, surprise at the end, etc. make this a good film for young children. Awards: Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1973; Washington National Student Film Festival, 1974; Brooklyn Independent Filmmakers Exposition, 1974; Vanguard Int'l Competition of Electronic Music for Film, 1974; Humboldt Film Festival, 1974. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.

In Wiertz and Verbeek's kinetic, kaleidoscopic opus Keep on Turning (1974, 3 min, 16mm, sound) cubes convey, rotate and shift in tandem.

2-minute animation film to music by John Coltrane.

Cuba programmed solid areas and volumes instead of the vector dots of the previous two films. It also in four "colors": black, white, light grey and dark grey. In five episodes, he alternates single events involving ribbon-like figures following intricate trajectories, with more complex episodes consisting of up to 40 individual events that appear and disappear at irregular intervals. Electronic sound scores accompany.

We watch white shapes dancing on black background, which changes when the white shape fills up the screen completely, and black lines and figures bounce around on the now white background.

In this short animation film the triangle achieves the distinction of principal dancer in a geometric ballet. The triangle is shown splitting into some three hundred transformations, dividing and sub-dividing with grace and symmetry to the music of a waltz. The film's artist and animator is René Jodoin, whose credits include Dance Squared and several collaborations with Norman McLaren.

An abstract animation film in which a series of shapes rotate and evolve into other forms producing an illusion of depth. Colour, texture and superimposed images undergo structural variations. - MIFF

This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.

These are work-in-progress elements of some commercial projects and a film to be titled, Knotte Grosse. Beckett received an AFI Independent Filmmakers grant to produce Knotte Grosse but it was unfinished at the time of his death. The images allude to computer-generated graphics (but are not) and foreshadow an interesting direction in his work. - Pamela Turner