Resist Tanz

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A short film by Nicole Siggins and Adina Bogert-O’Brien, March 2017
In an ever tumultuous world, these resistors dance their erratic, playful and furious dance. They are at war, they are fighting, they long to be free. They escape their confines, resist, and are dragged back into slavery. They move, they combat, they dance. They are spiky and strong. They are up against each other. Their conflict becomes a dance. Today is the time to resist, take action, and use the magnetic forces that exist to let yourself dance free in resistance. Resist Tanz.

Read more for information about how we made the film.

Nicole and I had been talking about making a short film and submitting to a festival for a while, so when I spotted the Hamburg International Short Film Festival’s deadline coming up we decided to go for it!

Our film idea was to make a stop motion film using resistors. We built a light box by taking a cardboard box and cutting out large panels from all four sides. We then taped translucent white paper to the large sides to make the light entering the box more diffuse, and left the smaller sides open to allow us to move the resistors around. Here’s a photo showing the open side of the box with the translucent paper overlapping a bit. The lamp shown was an early test model, not one we used in the end.

We then bought four led lamps from the hardware store, and set them up so that they were shining onto the paper.

We used Nicole’s iPhone to film, with an app called OSnap. The app takes time lapse photos and turns them into videos. This worked out pretty well because we could set the camera to automatically take photos with enough time in between to move the resistors.

We’re pretty proud of the result, and had so much fun at the film festivals!