Directing
Three residents of a small Rust Belt town lead sad, interconnected lives full of social service intervention, foster care, romance, and hatred.
Three women, one person. An astronaut drifting in the cosmic void argues with her “I” – the one from the past and from the future. Will there be room for all three materialized personalities on board a small ship? A comedic, feminist psychoanalysis in the science fiction convention with elements of musical and animation.
This film is a hybrid of drawn animation, live action and puppetry. The central theme is the unknown or the “other” and our efforts as individual humans to understand our place and relationship with the unknowable. There are several subjects woven into the film. These are: facial expressions of human and non-human primates; space training and missions of chimpanzees; human study of monkeys (symbolized by the image of Jane Goodall); interactions between humans and animals (taken from news reports); lumps-- organisms that wash up on beaches that fit no known life forms (also called globsters); and, extra-terrestrials.
This is the final installment in the Ima Plume trilogy. The film’s character, Ima Plume (pronounced EE-MA PLOOM), is a chalk-talk specialist or public illustrator who draws before small audiences. Her chalk talks are represented in the hand drawn animation segments. An homage to film noir, it explores Ima Plume’s investigation of her own death. Ima, Public Illustrator, grapples with trying to express things that might not be seen or drawn including: spirits, electronic voice phenomena and studies of animal locomotion. The film combines chalk and drawn animation, puppetry and live action. It is both fiction and documentary. Inspiration for the content and style is taken from pioneers of film, vaudeville, photography and spiritualism.
This is a sequel to Monkeys and Lumps. The Dreamless Sleep, the second in an intended trilogy, is a hybrid of drawn animation, live-action and puppetry. The Dreamless Sleep includes brief biographies of historic figures, like Else Bosselman, who drew underwater creatures as described by William Beebe from the windows of the bathysphere; and Christine the Astonishing, a medieval woman mystic. The film is based on a series of interviews with Ima Plume.
Dr. Sheri Myes survives the bombing of her home by protesters, but is changed forever by this traumatic experience. Isolated by her obsessions, she functions in a reality of her own creation. She is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough, grafting animal senses to her brain to regain the profundity of her near-death experience. Just when Dr. Myes is poised to succeed, she loses everything and must climb back up from the bottom using unconventional means. This hybrid of animation, songs, and live-action narrative follows the research of Dr. Sheri Myes and her attempts to expand human consciousness.
