Cathy Cook Response

(Cathy Cook from www.lorineniedecker.org/ 2011Presenters.cfm )


Last week we had a quest artist/filmmaker come into our digital class to talk about filmmaking in the contemporary art world. Cathy Cook, a filmmaker & professor at University of Maryland is doing a collaboration project with our digital class making 3 minute films based on a piece of literature. These pieces will have scores written for them by fellow composition conservatory students.  Cathy Cook brought up many different aspects of filmmaking, focusing on the component of sound within the film and showing us many examples of different ways one could interpret the project. I'm in the advanced section of the class, which gives me the choice to either pass on this project and focus on my overall long term project for this class or give this film a shot and see if I can incorporate it into my larger project goals. I've decided to give this project a shot.
My film will be a 2-3 minute piece that is branching off of one of the bodies of work I'm doing right now with a glowing orb. I'm going to have a contemporary dancer dance with the glowing orb-imprav. So its basically an performance piece made into a film. My original idea does incorporate aspects of contemporary dance and contemporary art into practice so I think this will be a nice component for my show.
When it comes to reflecting on her presence in the classroom I thought she brought up some interesting components of filmmaking that haven't been discussed much in class so far. Most of the components of filmmaking she brought up I've experienced before from previous filmmaking classes from high school (Interlochen arts academy). Though, considering the type of class she was speaking in I thought it was very relevant.