The spirituality-versus-religion debate is controversial territory for any filmmaker, but Adam Belanich '08 confronted it head-on with his animated short "Deus Ex Plume" at this year's SunDeis Film Festival. Belanich's film received the festival's prestigious Best Animation award. In an impressive show of Dartmouth's animation know-how, the two other nominees in the Best Animation category were Sonia Lei '08 and Carmen Kilpatrick '09.
The festival, held this year on March 3 and 4 at Brandeis University, was initiated by an undergraduate filmmaker in 2003 and is open to all students free of charge, regardless of their films' genres or runtimes. SunDeis administrators claim on the official website, www.sundeis.com, that the annual event is intended to "bring students, faculty, industry professionals, patrons, vendors, journalists and artists together under one roof" and to "award artistic achievement that would otherwise have gone unrecognized."
The three Dartmouth nominees can certainly attest to the latter. Lei, who created her animation "Icarus" as the final project for her Film Studies 35 class, was surprised by her critical success.
"I certainly hadn't been planning on entering the film in a festival," she said. "It was fun to see it nominated ... along with two other Dartmouth animations."
In "Icarus," a child goes out for a walk and encounters a bird chasing a bee. The bird loses feathers as it flies, and the child picks them up, flaps them like wings, and discovers that he can fly.
According to Lei, the project was more a learning experience than a competitive endeavor.
"I was working on technique and trying to learn how to organize an animation better. [I'm] not sure if that happened, though," she said.
Kilpatrick's project "Reality" was for an interdisciplinary class on the creative process. In the film, Joanne Cheung '09 voices a girl who puts on a costume and becomes "real." She then explores the "real world" and finds it stranger than she expected.
"[The film] was more experimental than story-driven," Kilpatrick explained. "I was really surprised that it was chosen for SunDeis, but also excited. I'm glad my films have been well-received, especially since I spend so much time on them."
Belanich says that "Deus Ex Plume," also his final project for animation course in the film studies department, "was created with no intention of winning anything or even being submitted to film festivals."
"My film lacks polish, and I was surprised people were able to overlook that so easily," he said.
In addition to Best Animation, "Deus Ex Plume" received the Best Music award for its piano score by Charlie DeTar, a Dartmouth graduate student in electro-acoustic music.
Belanich's animation runs only three minutes and 45 seconds, but in that time it manages to confront a massive issue: the nature of God. In this case, a felt-tipped pen plays the part of the supreme being, creating characters by actually drawing them onto the screen. They live in peace at first, but an inevitable conflict arises when they express varied interpretations of the being that created them. Eventually, a fight breaks out and the god-pen must intervene to maintain peace.
Belanich, a studio art major considering a second program in philosophy, drew upon personal experience as inspiration for the project. "Growing up in a religious family without an inclination toward religion really made me wonder where spirituality could fit into my own life," he said.
"Deus Ex Plume" was created using both paper animation and cell animation. Belanich started by drawing out sequential images by hand -- no doubt a tedious process, as each second of animation requires eight drawings. The images were then photographed and input into a computer program that converts them into a film file. He also made cell drawings on clear overhead sheets which could later be superimposed over the paper drawings to allow one character to remain stationary while the others moved. In all, Belanich estimated that 1,000 overheads and paper drawings were created for the project.
"Not counting many hundred pages of errors," he joked.
Though he plans to focus more on drawing and printmaking in the future, Belanich is glad that "Deus Ex Plume" has garnered so much critical acclaim.
"I didn't want to make a film that was just cute, but rather one that made people think," he said.
