Below is an experimental feature film devised by the 2022 cohort of the University of Salford MA in Film Production. It’s called Sequence Breaker and is a work in process. This is a bold, innovative film. Students described the process as ‘feeling like we jumped out of a plane and had to make a film on the way to the ground.’ It was devised in 12 weeks.
MA Student Lizzy Delahunt’s BA Thesis Film. University of Salford
Below is an experimental feature film devised by the 2022 cohort of the University of Salford MA in Film Production. It’s called Sequence Breaker and is a work in process. This is a bold, innovative film. Students described the process as ‘feeling like we jumped out of a plane and had to make a film on the way to the ground.’ It was devised in 12 weeks.
egeus wants his daughter married, cloistered, or dead and uses his considerable political influence toward these ends – this is no ‘light fairy romp’, its a nightmare in which hermia and helena utter not a single word once they’re married
mfa project. 2010. mixed-media adaptation of shakespeare’s midsummer (1st-year M.F.A. director showcase). an 80-minute-long tragicomic nightmare unsettling the phallocentric lacanian trilogy of imaginary, symbolic and real… plus slapstick.
link below goes to a short video used in the piece.
Lysander and Demetrius RT: 1m 8s from John Zibell on Vimeo.
all photos shot by kristine slipson
[professor of design and lead designer on the production, john] iacovelli said. ‘john z started the design process by bringing in some striking images: They were clean and modern, and each had a kinetic energy to them. there was also a translucent quality to them. john has guided us to what I think is a stunning looking production.’
john greer (demetrius), alison sundstrum (helena), matt dunnivan (lysander), john zibell (oberon/camera) and allison minick (hermia).
matt dunnivan (lysander) and allison minick (hermia) dream of escaping court.
john greer as flute/thisbe and matt dunnivan as bottom/pyramus, the court of theseus projected looks on in judgment
bottom alone in the nightmare wood (matt dunnivan)
alison sundstrom as helena, allison minick as hermia and john greer as demetrius
allison minick (peter quince) alison sundstrum (snug the joiner/lion) and john greer (flute the bellows mender/thisbe).
Special Issue
i co-edited (with lynette hunter, alex lichtenfels, and heather nolan), the june 2020 special issue of Performance Matters and and co-wrote (with heather) an article for the issue.
the issue (vol 6, no1: 2020) is titled Copresence With the Camera. it can be found at this link:
https://performancematters-thejournal.com/index.php/pm/issue/view/15
the article heather and i wrote is titled
“Action with Camera: Making the Future Audience Present”
it can be found at this link:
https://performancematters-thejournal.com/index.php/pm/article/view/263
and this is the abstract:
This paper—a conversation between scholar/practitioners working separately on the mediation of bodies—is an interrogation into practices of acting for stage and for camera, and the ways that practices for the theatre can be used in training actors for film. Challenging the essentializing metaphor, “acting for camera,” we engage strategies for dislocation of the sovereign seat of the director—a point of focus toward which bodies are trained and become entrained. Rather than accept habitually repeated logics of representation and the subjectivities they tend to produce, we develop practices that replace actor with player. Drawing on various inflections of the physical action from divergent Western theatrical training traditions (Stanislavski, Grotowski, and Brecht), we have developed strategies for actors and a framework for thinking about what “works” for the camera and what doesn’t. These strategies pull the camera into practice and process as an active player rather than seating it as an apparatus of capture to be coped with by a performer on one side and a director/crew on the other. The player plays with the camera rather than for a future audience it represents. Much of the paper draws from workshops where we used theatrical devising techniques and games with filmmakers and actors. We take as a given that most actors-in-training in the West already have a relationship to camera that brings along habits, ways of seeing, and entanglements that require examination as part of rehearsal and performance processes. We pull the camera into the making process, not as a capture device or a stand-in for a future audience, nor as “content,” but as one of the elements of mise-en-scène and the games that players use to produce it. Actors become filmmakers and vice versa. The processes we found emerging unsettled the habitual narrativizations arising from the actor-filmmaker-editor continuum.
John Zibell 