Software Downloads Information: Elisabeth Caravella films a haunted software in a “tutorial …

We discovered the film HOWTO Elizabeth Caravella there about a year, on the occasion of the exhibition of students of Fresnoy. The young artist, passed first by the Fine Arts of Poitiers and the School of Decorative Arts in Paris, took possession of the codes of tutorial video, infusing this format, so dear to the internet, a poetic dimension.

On the occasion of the screening of HOWTO Sunday, August 30 at the Silhouette Festival in Paris, Elisabeth Caravella back on this singular short film on his latest project, presented this year video creation contest “Sosh Inrocks love lab”.

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Elisabeth Caravella, HOWTO trailer

HOWTO takes the form of a software tutorial learning. What interested you in this format?

I’ve seen a lot since my adolescence. I loved making web sites, photo editing and 3d. The tutorials are ideal when you live in the middle of nowhere. With the internet, we have everything at hand and now the video tutorial has become a real phenomenon. I imagined a film tutorial, where history would be built from the screen shot before diving inside the software. HOWTO is a bit for me an outlet. It extends experiments I had made during my studies. I had already made false unnecessary tutorials for example, where we learned to make double clicks or put two songs in a playlist in shuffle mode. Really absurd stuff that made me rejoice. Somehow, HOWTO is also a self-portrait. He’s talking about me while paying tribute to my tool and my day

How the film s’ is it built?

The software has been designed as a movie set. He can not do anything. I worked from improvisation that I refined gradually. I did not know where the film would take me and that’s certainly why I did it. I wanted to make the voice myself. I think that my speed and my doubts tutorial make it more credible, more amateur.

For the movement of the drapery, I used motion capture in partnership with Mocaplab studio. Dancer and choreographer Aina Alegre improvised from words and feelings that I stated it. These dances have greatly influenced the history of film.

howto, software is inhabited by an uncontrollable element, a bug embodied by a ghostly presence that evolves inside the machine. This fiction she reflects your own relationship, as an artist, technology news?

In the binary system of the computer, there are zeros and ones, of yes, non, but not perhaps. I wanted to incorporate a free form. The drape is a bit like a bug, a creation of the computer itself, a reminiscence. The computer is for me like a second home, a workshop, but also a rigid and cold medium. I think I fight with this machine to make it as human as possible. I am fascinated by such mathematical calculations that create 3d dynamic or organic materials such as water, hair, or fabrics. The algorithms that have designed drape HOWTO can foretold how the fabric will fall, with what folds. It’s fascinating how the 3D sometimes seems so real.

Research draped for HOWTO

Your film Hypersensitive , directed this year is itself a fiction filmed entirely in Photoshop in a spirit very low-fi. What was the starting point for this project?

Sometimes when I use Photoshop to start moving the items to make them talk to each other when I procrastinate. I made a first attempt to film on Photoshop during my first years of study. I found it interesting to show the manipulation of images in a totally absurd and a little cheap. Make Photoshop, which became so powerful over the years, a shooting software. Google Images had become my production studio when I wanted a set, I typed “police station” or I was looking for “actor studio” to find my actors and I ended up falling for David Hasselhoff or Johnny Depp

For a long time I wanted to take this idea. I would also make a web series, including Hypersensitive is the driver, but more liberated yet the narrative form.

Elisabeth Caravella Hypersensitive

You use in HOWTO like Hypersensitive , capture software to film the screen. What this technique you interested? It’s a bit of a distancing of the camera as an object, the computer screen becomes the place of filming, editing and dissemination …

I am left with enough film codes. I have already made films more “classical”, with a camera, but I’m less comfortable. Unless this is a documentary form, it is not my sandbox! I finally found a new way to more personal and unexpected shooting. By filming the screen, we immediately see the result, you know exactly what you film is very front. The computer screen becomes a camera. Ultimately remain only the software with the mouse gestures and voice. These constraints leave a pretty big part in the imagination.

The two films are marked by absurd humor and almost content. The software described in Howto eg allows creating texts 3d outdated … Was it already the case with your previous work?

I am trying to make me laugh every time, hoping it would at least make my friends laugh! Sometimes I’m ashamed of so much nonsense that escapes me. But I do not think about anything but laugh because something has touched us. There is in all the tutorials sound off camera that I find fascinating. It is an opening on an intimate space. We sometimes hear, while the voice explains how to make a beautiful 3D rendering, cutlery noises, the mother says “table” … items that were not included in the film but allow to imagine who this person, three-dimensional space where it is …

in your two films, the solitude of the person who, alone in front of it, trying to communicate expertise or tells a story , is very touching effect.

Perhaps it is because deep down I do not really play. There is a small “cinema truth” side in these films, I actually only talking to my computer. I also believe that this must reflect a distrust that I have vis-à-vis the new media, including social networks that I have a hard time doing it.

Even with the internet, we are left alone to invent ghosts. Lots of people share tutorials but in the end, it’s still alone in front of the screen while you look at one person behind his. When talking to everyone, and thus to anyone, perhaps not speaking to anyone.

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