Director, Drawings, Editing and Soundtrack Dryden Goodwin
Production Assistance Jonathan Houlding, Mike Cole, Sophie Clements, Jo Cole, Tony Peretta, Lucie Baldwin and Rob Baldwin
Thanks to Liz Lahav

A fugitive escape path of drawn interventions over a live action journey.

A fugitive escape path across five interlinked spaces - city, motorway, forest, coast and sea - using pen and ink drawn interventions into a live action journey.

A fugitive escape path across five interlinked spaces. The artist’s interventions in the live action journey suggest an evolving relationship between an unseen protagonist and their surroundings as we are propelled from overcrowded urban vistas towards isolation in wide-open space.

A fugitive escape path across five interlinked spaces. Flight becomes a subjective physical exit journey with multiple possible psychological readings, where we are propelled from overcrowded urban vistas towards isolation in wide-open space. The artist’s pen and ink-drawn interventions into the live action journey are ambiguous gestures that suggest an evolving relationship between an unseen protagonist and their surroundings. The multi-layered soundtrack, fusing location sounds and orchestration adds to the complexities of the film’s reading.

Live action video with interventions of animated pen and ink drawings.

Flight is a fugitive escape path moving from the claustrophobic city out through the motorway networks, through forests, to the edge of the land with the sea, across the water and into the sky, propelled away from overcrowded urban vistas towards isolation in wide-open space. Through five interlinked episodes, moving through these different environments, there is no visible central protagonist. The viewer experiences a subjective physical exit journey and its multiple possible psychological readings. Is Flight a film about the hope of liberation or the fear of pursuit? Or is it an unresolved, restless dilemma: the inability to settle and relate to a people and place, mirroring the ever-changing relationship of the individual to their surroundings?

The material that underpins Flight will be live action. My primary concern is to make the role animation plays an active one in constructing the meaning of the work. It is the different tensions created within the repertoire of pen and ink marks that offer the viewer different gestures, suggesting an evolving relationship between the unseen protagonist and their surroundings and posing the question of why a certain moment is slowed down or a certain scene is traced or obliterated by the animation.

Each of the five episodes will run for approximately 70 seconds, engaging with the landscapes traversed during the escape. They will be contrasting in rhythm and pace: moving from stillness and serenity, cut through with frenetic jostling, to bursts of full, overwhelming acceleration suddenly tempered by moments of seemingly suspended time. The linear ‘narrative’ of forward motion in Flight will create a continuous through line for the viewer. However, as well as accentuating the forward momentum of the journey, the animation will also disrupt the linear time. There will be momentary interventions that solidify and attempt to make tactile the transitory landscape and fleeting moods, as if the viewer is being invited to commit to memory selected instances, scenes and details on this journey.

Flight will be based around live action footage taken with digital video or sequences of still photography taken with a high-resolution digital stills camera. Flight will contain sequences rich in natural saturated colours, interspersed with the monochrome drawn elements. I am interested in surprising the audience with images that are very physical and experiential.

The soundtrack will be made up of manipulated, multi-layered, collaged wild sounds from the environments of the episodes, fused with elements of musical orchestration and peppered at times with fragments of voices and other found/natural sounds. The sound will be used both to accentuate and counterpoint the pacing of the images and to shape the emotional narrative of the film with moments of near silence set against dramatic swells.

The ambiguity of the gesture of the animation in Flight (tender, gentle, rough, agitated, sympathetic, aggressive) will continually activate viewers’ readings of the film. It is the contrast between the movement and moments of stillness in the film that will create suspense and surprise for a viewer. The imagery and atmospheres of these real spaces are made strange and uncanny through the interventions into the material. The style will keep the audience guessing, not allowing them to feel settled in the visual world I am creating.