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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