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Honey is a 6 minute animated film based on a poem of the same name
by American writer Robert Morgan which showed up on the fax machine
one day. I loved how the poem started out with practical advice
on beekeeping and culminated in a gloriously literate and spiritual
summation of what honey is made up of.
My idea for the film was to take a whimsical look at the relationship
between the keeper and the bees while drawing parallels between
their behaviour. I used a combination of animation methods including
cutouts, pixillation and a form of moving collage. I also combined
live action with animation to blend Irish dancing with the honey
bee communication dance. The dance was performed to MmmmHaa,
a piece by Carla
Hallett. The remaining music which accompanies the field
sequence and closing credits was composed by Robert
Minden and performed by both Robert Minden and Carla Hallett.
As with the previous film Lost
and Found, their music was a match made in heaven.
The middle section of the film consists of a reading of the poem
by Robert Morgan with pixillated images of the keeper and the two
worker bees. The bees are actually people in work shirts toiling
away at a table producing honey. The keeper glides in to steal the
honey comb and replace it with an empty frame for them to begin
filling again. As the poem proceeds, describing how to look after
bees, we see how the bees react to their treatment. Ultimately honey
is the distillation of the efforts of both species along with their
surrounding environment.
The moving collage takes us through the seasons of one particular
field in a year. I was thinking of how we recall things, usually
starting out with a recent memory and then going backwards from
there. Memory can also be a bit non linear or particular events
will stand out. I had the sequence where the field is being mowed
for haying moving forwards in time. I then switched into reverse
for the transition from spring back to winter.
The end credits had been carefully scripted out to synch up with
the music but since I had all kinds of material at hand the impulse
to add beads and dancing bees was too hard to resist. Spontaneous
animation seems like an oxymoron but was a lot of fun in combination
with carefully planned elements.
Festivals
2005 - Edges Film Festival, Victoria, BC, Jury Award
2004- RiverRun International Film Festival, Winston-Salem,NC,USA
2003
- Victoria Independant Film and Video Festival,
Canada
- Women in the Directors Chair, Chicago, IL, USA
2002- 4th Brisbane International Animation Festival, Austrailia
- 29th Northwest Film and Video Festival, Portland, OR, USA
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