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MICHAEL LANGAN & TERAH MAHER

Music by Steve Reich
Choros

source: thecameraforum

Watching this film the words mesmerizing, incredibly beautiful, and fluid spring immediately to my mind. This is one of those artistic creations that make me say to myself “Damn, another one I wish I had created!”

The film, directed by Michael Langan and Terah Maher, combines music, dance, and image multiplication to create a film that enhances our perceptions of motion. “Choros” delivers a visually mesmerizing narrative in three movements by following a dancer’s (Maher) experience of discovery, euphoria, and rebirth through this surreal phenomenon, and featurs music from Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.”

ABOUT THE TECHNIQUE

“Choros” is an experimental film steeped in tradition, modernizing a visual echo technique developed for scientific study in the 1880s.
In the late nineteenth century, a photographic technique called “chronophotography” began to develop, whereby multiple photographs would be taken in rapid succession to study the movement of a given subject. Eadweard Muybridge famously filmed a horse in motion in 1878, providing the world with its first taste of motion pictures when the images were displayed on a spinning zoetrope.

Several years later, the French physicist Etienne-Jules Marey developed a stunning variation of this technique when he captured multiple poses of a subject over time onto a single frame of film, rendering a kind of visual echo. The nature of this process limited the subject matter to that which could be photographed in a black studio using stark lighting, to prevent overexposure of the background when multiple images are layered over one another.

In 1968, just six years before Steve Reich began composing “Music for 18 Musicians,” Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren adapted Marey’s layering technique to actual motion pictures, in a groundbreaking film entitled “Pas de Deux.” The additive nature of multiple exposures in chemically processed photography, however, likewise limited McLaren to the confines of a black box studio with high-contrast side lighting.

Norman McLaren, of the animation department, National Film Board of Canada, drawing directly on film in 1944.
With the making of “Choros” Michael Langan and Terah Maher revisit these technical innovations and attempt to contribute original innovations of their own. Using recent advancements in digital compositing, the technique developed for “Choros” introduces color, frees the film from the confines of a black studio, and allows the dancer to linger in one position without risk of overexposure, resulting in a variation of this historical technique that allows a degree of subtlety heretofore prohibited by technical limitations.

Created using Adobe After Effects as composites, there is very little slow motion used in the film and limited to some speed ramping at transitions toward the beginning. No green screen was used at all, though they did use some chroma keying in the outdoor shots. Good old-fashioned rotoscoping (No Plugins Used) with many layers using various blending modes and methods applied.
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source: motionographer

In the tradition of Norman McLaren’s 1968 film Pas de Deux, Michael Langan and Terah Maher combine music, dance, and image multiplication to create a film that enhances our perception of motion. Choros features music from Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

Choros is an experimental film steeped in tradition, modernizing a visual echo technique developed for scientific study in the 1880s. A fascinating write-up by the filmmakers on the chronophotography technique is available at their indiegogo.
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source: inspiroonnet

Piękny, eksperymentalny film dwójki reżyserów : Michael Langan, Terah Maher.
To trzynastominutowe, hipnotywujące, taneczne widowisko jednej zmultiplikowanej postaci tancerki. Wyzwanie dla percepcji i zmysłów. Polecamy. Muzyka : Steve Reich.