A man's love for his bird backfires on him in The Love Nest. © COG Ltd. and Shelly Wain.

The Love Nest
This quite charming and beautifully composed puppet animation ("with a little CG and Flash") employs a classical shooting style in the service of a bittersweet fable of avian love and revenge. Walking a fine line between preciousness and knowing irony, director Shelly Wain has succeeded in creating a childlike story that sustains interest through a series of unpredictable narrative twists and turns, while exploiting her limited set in a variety of imaginative ways. (I especially liked her use of animated Chinese screens to reflect the events taking place in the puppet world and the occasional sophisticated use of shadows to advance the story.) If the denouement seems a little too pat and politically correct, it's also well within the logic of the narrative, and the fact that it can be cause for discomfort is a testament to Wain's skill in bringing her characters to life.

As an animator at COG Ltd., Shelly Wain worked on the children's series PB Bear And Friends and Yoho Ahoy, and designed and created the pilot, 9 Kitten Mews. She also leads a workshop in filmmaking for children and is pursuing an MA in digital animation. The Love Nest, which was funded by the filmmaker and COG, is Wain's first film. It has screened at the World of Women Festival in Sydney, Animadrid and the Tehran Film Festival, among others.

Oblivion explores memories. © 2001 University of Southern California — School of Cinema-Television.

Oblivion
Using DV footage processed with Alias|Wavefront Maya, this very short film is an attempt, according to the director's notes, to explore the vicissitudes of memory, specifically the problems inherent in trying to forget. Director FengTing Tsou has come up with some striking and suggestive images, including the shifting matrix of rectangular shapes that frames his manipulated footage, but whatever meaning he intends to convey is recondite at best. The track, consisting of a series of recognizable sounds (e.g., a phone ringing, a baby crying) isn't much help in interpreting his intentions. This kind of ambiguity isn't necessarily a bad thing, and the fact that Tsou lists Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, as an influence implies at least some seriousness of purpose. Yet the film feels very sketchy and, (this could be a first), is altogether too brief. While a longer duration might or might not make this a more successful effort, it seems like a minimum requirement to effectively treat the subject at hand.

FengTing Tsou received a BA in Naval Architecture from the National Taiwan Ocean University before beginning his studies in animation and digital art at USC's School of Cinema-Television. Oblivion, which was made for a 2nd-year experimental animation class, was created in two weeks. At one point the filmmaker worked straight through four days without sleep. The night before the film was to be shown Tsou borrowed nine additional computers to generate the film's 1,887 frames in time for the screening.