“Night Creatures”
Title:
- Night Creatures
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Filmmaker, Video Artist, or Animator(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Artist Statement:
Night Creatures is an augmented reality experience celebrating the energy, connection, and intimacy of the film festival queue via animated cinema-goers who take the form of fruit bats. Eight well-dressed stop-motion puppets talk to you about their favourite films, connections to subcultures, cinema experiences that shaped them, best film snacks, and other interesting and moving stories. Featuring eight short stories – derived from interviews conducted with a diverse selection of film festival patrons, volunteers, and employees – and a ninth experience inviting an audience response, viewers can interact with the animated bats at various locations.
Each story is delivered as a stop-motion animated performance, each with a uniquely sculpted, stylishly dressed bat puppet. The stories contain surreal and magical elements to enhance the storytelling — surprise chickens, floating fish, a rainstorm — help to visually interpret the ideas embedded in the dialogue. All stories contain music to enhance and enrich them, and closed captions are provided for when audio can’t be used. Each story has a duration of between 50 and 90 seconds
Night Creatures was originally designed to be experienced in a cinema queue. Cardboard cutout bats fly above and stand amongst the audience providing access via a QR code accessible on personal mobile devices. The work runs in a browser on any online mobile device.
Creating a work that can be held in the hand of the viewer was for us a perfectly intimate format for creating a connection with the audience and the personal nature of the stories. Augmented reality works so well with our hand-made aesthetic, which were able to preserve to make our characters feel real. We partnered with Art Processors who worked with us to realise our very specific and at times technically-challenging vision, and feel thrilled that we succeeded in creating something that feels real and analogue within the digital world of AR. This was also due to the incredible music composed by Lehmann B Smith, and the compositing by Benjamin Portas.
