08.March.1999
Les Poissons:
Journey Into the Mind of the Fish
During March the New Venue is the official online screening venue for the New York Underground Film Festival, bringing you subversive, twisted and underground films only available for viewing over the Internet.
For your enjoyment and edification, Honkworm tackles the "art film" genre with this piece from its award-winning ouvre of Fish Bar digital flicks, "Les Poissons: Journey Into the Mind of the Fish".
Concept and Script
Johan Liedgren
Noah Tannen
Animation and Graphics
Janet Galore
Voices
Christopher MacRae
Nathan Reed
Sound and Music
fnuRpf Productions
Produced by
Honkworm International LLC
Stills from "Les Poissons"
(reduced size)
The journey is Honkworm's first attempt into the subtle and multilayered mind of the fish. Says Galore, "There is so much to fish that we don't understand -- they are in many ways our mentors."
Honkworm is a Seattle-based creative studio that started with online animation and has expanded to other media. The core team (the talent behind this week's digital flick) often acts as a creative headquarters collaborating with talented folks from all over the world.
New Venue:
What is the appeal of digital filmmaking?
Honkworm:
Creating films digitally allows us incredible flexibility and speed. What might take weeks to film, edit, and composite in analog can take us a couple of days to do digitally. With animation, it's just as hard to make someone take off his sunglasses as it is to grow a second head, so we go where our imaginations take us. Digital art, music and film enjoy a distribution that other media do not.
New Venue:
How do you take into account the constraints of the Internet?
Honkworm:
You know, we don't really see them as constraints. We see bandwidth and processors limitations as analogous to sonnets and forms. If you throw them out altogether, you don't have a sonnet, but by playing with these boundaries, you get something unexpected and interesting. The limitations help define the work.
New Venue:
What technology did you use?
Honkworm:
We used Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Flash 3 to create this. We can make it play in any format -- Shockwave Flash, Quicktime, RealFlash, or Windows Media Player.
New Venue:
Why Fish?
Honkworm:
Fish have these great expressions -- soulful, worried, amused. But behind that there's nothing; they are a total blank. Fish are dumb as boards, and these are dead fish. Plus they're easier to work with than geese.
New Venue:
The French are funny. Sex is funny. Comedy is funny. Why aren't French Sex Comedies funny?
Honkworm:
This is an issue we used to wrestle with until we realized that Jerry Lewis just couldn't outperform John Holmes.
New Venue:
Where else can we see your work?
Honkworm:
www.honkworm.com!!!
The Fish Bar series is featured in numerous Internet film festivals.
Presently, you cannot view this movie because someonen else has exclusive rights.
You can find out about other digital flicks in the New Venue Archives.
