Former students’ short film to be screened at film fest in Germany

An award-winning, 3-D short [film] (https://vimeo.com/71557019) created by two former Texas A&M visualization students has been selected for screening in a prestigious German film festival.

The film, “Tarang,” directed by Jonny Greenwald ’09, with visual effects by Shyam Kannapurakkaran ’10, is a four-minute video collage of a traditional Indian dance. It will be screened during the April 30 – May 5, 2015 [International Short Film Festival] (http://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/) in Oberhausen, Germany.

“The festival is a discoverer of new trends and talent as well as one of the most important short film institutions anywhere in the world,” said its director, Lars Henrik Glass.

The film’s [cubist] (http://thedelightsofseeing.blogspot.com/2011/03/cubism-joiners-and-multiple-viewpoint.html) visual style was inspired by the work of artist David Hockney, who frequently depicted scenes in collages made of a patchwork of images.

“We knew that Hockney had already created a video version of his collage concept, but we wanted to create a piece that explored time and perspective in a more expressive form,” said Greenwald. “This is the first time the dance has been filmed and represented as a 3-D collage.”

The film features the dancing and choreography of Aparupa Chatterjee with a music mix created by Ganesh Rao, ’11, also a former viz student.

The filmmakers used a camera on a custom platform made by Kannapurakkaran at the college’s [Automated Fabrication & Design Lab] (http://fablab.arch.tamu.edu) to capture nine performances by Chatterjee, who added variety to the dance with each take.

“‘Tarang’ is the culmination of her performances in a single, flowing piece,” said Greenwald. “During editing, I capitalized on the cohesion or fragmentation in her movements to tell the story that I felt the dance and music were trying to communicate.”

The film is a re-edit of a student project Greenwald and Kannapurakkaran originally made in 2010 with guidance and critiques from Karen Hillier, now a professor emerita of visualization.

“Emerging from a quiet beginning, the film’s visual and aural rhythms build to create a complex array of simultaneous points of view,” she said.

The film won the LA3D Film Festival’s Ro-Man Bronze Award in 2012, the Best Experimental Project award in the Hollywood 3-D Film Festival in 2011 and the NVIDIA Immersive Visualization Challenge Award at Texas A&M in 2010.

"Tarang" has also screened at numerous film festivals in previous years, including the 2012 Big Bear Lake Film Festival.