ChickFlick

 

INTRO

 

Chickflick is a series of three short animation pieces addressing the ongoing mistreatment of queer folk in the United States . Despite their growing presence in movies, television and other popular media, the country, the government has yet to be fully accultured to the presence of the queer community. We are unable to fully predicate whether its pop culture that is flawed by showing queers in certain stereotypes thus furthering their ostracization or whether it comes down to certain facets of society that are impenetrable when it comes to consenting to higher bars of acceptance.

Chickflick plays within those boundaries of predication and exhibits the innate anarchy that some people/governments see in queer folk. Every short film has a violent climactic ending, resulting in falling heads, vaporizing, and transforming. We wonder whether despite all the presence of queers in pop culture is this how their foes view them? As a nonsensical group of people who could very well be cartoon characters that probably are deserving of annihilation either from Dumbo the elephant or themselves.

 

CRAFT

 

We took a still from the motion pictures: To Wongfoo thanks for everything, Newly Newmar As good as it gets, and Chasing Amy, and we deconstructed its element and started moving them around saving as jpgs in between and placed them in sequence on Adobe Premiere and added a cartoon soundtrack which was carefully selected to accentuate the trivialization of people's perception of queer folk.

In ‘Hey dumbo, thanks for everything..' we show how transvestites are chased out of the screen by a loving dumbo that in the flash of his rage becomes a evil gun-wielding pachyderm that blows them away. Dumbos, guns, gay-haters, the elephant, spell republican.

In ‘as fish as it gets' we show the triviliazation of how people view a man in love with a man and making it a funny three shot act where he keeps looking at him and getting aroused and finally beheads him with a fish that sprouts out of his mouth. That represents how religions effect the treatment of queers.

In ‘chasing hedwig' we show how once you have been labeled gay you are flippant and crazy like the girl in “chasing Amy” who cannot choose who or what she wants, we thought of cranking that notion to an extreme and show her switching roles, zapping heads to her satisfaction, but as a fatal twist her final chosen companion is Hedwig who rejects her and walks away.

We then captured all the acts of violence from the chapters and grouped hem together to more appropriate music in order to showcase the treatment of the existence of the queer community by some individuals even today.

 

 

SEQUITUR

 

Animation was a whole new ground for us. We were unfamiliar with Flash and although we were willig to learn we didn't have the time. We decided to use our own resources, with Harish's photoshop skills and Salina 's editing prowess we constructed multiple images that we strung together to create these short features. We purposely wanted it to look choppy and robot like to distance it further from reality and make it look constructed yet whimsical.

Bringing a still picture to life was very powerful, we discovered the scope of manipulation that one can have through digital means. Being whimsical and ridiculous bears its fruits, out of imagination it is easy to demoralize any group of people. We were confronted with the thought that imagination can be put to bad use as well good. Its when the imagination fades into reality where people's notions get completely thwarted.

 

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