Review of Gisele Kerosene - by Jan Kounen

Gisele Kerosene is a short film by Dutch film maker Jan Kounen. The experimental video was made in 1989 and is very craft orientated, using stock-frame animation as the main material to create the film.

The story is about four witches in a very modern-looking city. At the beginning of the film they are showed worshipping an object with a bird-shaped head on a stick. Another witch in red then flies past on a broomstick and steals it. The four witches mount their broomsticks and race after the thief in order to try and retrieve their precious object. This leads to a chase around the city landscape in which one by one, each witch ends up badly injured as well as a nurse and her patient in a wheelchair. At the end the last witch left chasing the red witch crashes into a wall and the thief then hands it back the item. The film doesn't appear to have much of a concept - the only meaning I get from it is the thrill and danger of the chase - the thief seems to have stolen the item in order to make mischief, rather than the object meaning anything to him, hence why in the end he gives it up.

This video was heavily crafted and intricate in it's design. The stock frame animation used would have been painstakingly time consuming and difficult to do. In order to give the impression of flight with the witches on broomsticks the creators had to take hundreds of pictures of the actors jumping. They then had to put these pictures together in a sequence. Jan Kounen's inventive take on stop-frame animation makes this a very fun and comical piece.

Review of Doll Face - by Andy Huang

Doll Face is a short experimental video by Andy Huang. It is a state-of-the-art film in terms of the technology based graphics used in the video. The film is about a robot that has the face of a female human. It is watching a television that is flicking through channels on the screen and then pausing ever so often on a face. The robot then mimics the look by using it's multiple arms to cover itself in makeup. The concept behind this video is perfection and the lengths human beings will go to attempt to achieve it.

At the beginning, the robot's face is just plain and grey. It seems desperate to copy what it sees on the screen to the point that it's desperation ultimately 'breaks' it. I feel the artist is making a strong point about the media and it's negative effect on us. He is trying to convey our unhealthy obsession with body-image and beauty and how the modern vision of perfection has advanced to such an unattainable level that it has got to the point where we are in danger of destroying ourselves in order to obtain it.

The robot itself signifies both the modern technological age and the way beauty is projected to us in such a shallow context - a robot is a cold, hard, non-feeling being but the face on it is not. It also I think represents the idea of humans conforming to one idea; the robot wants to look just like the face that's being projected but if we were all to look the same we would no longer be an individual. We would all be, figuratively speaking, 'robots' in our behaviour and looks, just like the one in the film.

This film has been beautifully crafted and you can see the amount of skill and time it took to create. The ending is genuinely moving because the robot represents a real person struggling to be everything it thinks it should be; and I think that strikes us all personally in some way or another. We can all associate with the robot being. The story and it's message is powerful and because of that leaves you thinking about it. It brought up quite a lot of emotion in me and I thought it was a very clever, inventive piece.