Eileen Anastasia Reynolds' short, "Synchronicity Series", investigates processes of collective performance based on navigational behaviors in animals. She has produced shorts and had pixilation workshops within communities in Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh, and the United States. After receiving her BFA in Painting from The University of New Mexico and an MFA in Film, Video, and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago she joined The School of Art Design and Media in Singapore as Assistant Professor of Digital Animation. She has taught Drawing, Animation History, Trick Film, Animation Seminar, and Stop Motion Animation.
She is a recipient of several grants including two research grants from the Nanyang Technological University, a Digital Incentive Award for painting, and the Paul Blankenship Memorial Grant for Emerging Artists. Exhibitions/Screenings include: University Sains Malaysia Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, SITE Santa Fe, The Arts House in Singapore, Albuquerque Art Museum, and Gallery X in Chicago. International Film Festivals include: Slamdance, Stuttgart, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Lyon France, Marfa, Santa Fe, Iceland, Singapore, and New York.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT:
Overall, 33 future engineers and artists worked together to make a visually interesting film using limited technology. As the project developed, I realized the concept and process had become intertwined. It moved from the initial vision of a controlled line within a crowd, to other formations where the performers were becoming significant units in a larger whole. In a sense, we created our own little human collective, where the view of the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Within our ongoing, repetitious, and somewhat meditative frame by frame process, the mantra - E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one – emerged.
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I found it very refreshing that a recent review in Slug magazine summed this film up much better than I ever explained. In my previous explanations I had been overly concerned with the process and did not explain the final outcome. I appreciate this comment on the disconnection:
"A ghostly line of stop-motion-animated figures clothed in white performs a stiff dance of coordinated undulations and group movement. The film’s synopsis declares it a symbol of human cooperation, but this sense of meaning is almost entirely unsupported by the images present. Having read no synopses prior to the screening, I was struck with a sense of disconnected tranquility–of movement that is a world apart from our own. This is a wholly disparate tone from the stated intention. Regardless, the piece is vivid and, in one way or the other, successful."