Animator's film
premieres at Sundance

It's an odd afternoon for the second of January. Sunlight fails to burn away the morning's penetrating fog, and the campus floats in a veiled limbo of drizzling rain and the remnants of winter break.

Lifeless parking lots yawn. On Franklin Street, a coffee shop with exposed brick walls offers refuge from the damp chill, but its low lighting does nothing to brighten the day.

Enter Francesca Talenti, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies. She is there to talk about her new film, "The Planets," which has been awarded a coveted spot on the roster of the 2003 Sundance Film Festival that begins Jan. 16 in Park City, Utah.

Talenti puts a cup of coffee on a table, along with a color brochure for "The Planets." The cover beckons with colors that seductively swirl like translucent sheets of streaky stained glass. The day brightens, and a journey begins as Talenti talks about her work.

"The Planets," one must understand, is an outer space odyssey that bears little resemblance to those orbs circling the sun that we think we know. Using a proprietary technology that she's developed, Talenti has filmed a six-minute cosmic journey that is, as she describes it, "nine patterns, nine color fields, nine planets. One total trip."

To simplify the experience, imagine something akin to light flooding in from the back of colored glass and that the glass is patterned like marbleized paper. The glass/paper is transparent, and get this: It flows.

"Motion," Talenti says, "is the heart of animation." And by manipulating a clear tray filled with swirls of color, Talenti was able to backlight the tray and film the viscous fluid as colors spread, contracted, tangled and formed striking oppositions.

Eventually the luminous colors co-mingled to the point that the contrasts degenerated into a brown sea. And this is where the editing process began, selecting just the right ripples in the streams to evoke her visions.

"Cream in coffee, curlicues of smoke, ink in water - liquids, patterns of organic chaos. It has taken me eight years," Talenti says, "to find just the right materials to capture these patterns on film."

She shot "The Planets" in 35 millimeter on a traditional film animation machine, an Oxberry. Typical film speed in motion pictures is 24 frames per second; the best the Oxberry can do is six frames per second. That means that when viewed, the footage zooms by at four times faster than it was animated.

"So I had to slow my motion down," Talenti explains. "They say `every obstacle is an opportunity,' so it gives an unreal motion -- and I kind of like that."

A narration accompanies "one woman's trip" to the planets, complete with heartbeats and recordings appropriated from NASA's web site.

Talenti's film earned a slot in the Sundance's "Frontier" lineup. According to the elite festival's information, "Frontier is an always-provocative program that spotlights the work of filmmakers who dare to be extreme in their experimentation, who bravely subvert convention, and who push boundaries to expand the cinematic envelope."

This isn't Talenti's first time at Sundance. Her two-minute film, "Partita," -- "an animation evoking Atlantis through the use of Renaissance architectural drawings and underwater photography" -- was shown there in 1990.

In addition to making a multitude of short films, Talenti has written, produced and directed "Snake Tales," a feature-length film that she completed in 1998 while teaching at the University of Texas at Austin. "Snake Tales" was shown in 19 international festivals and garnered nine awards. It is, she says, "an
adaptation of the `Arabian Nights' to Texas folk life, shot entirely in Texas, with local cast and crew."

Talenti also has been working on what will be a series of 10 films, "Poetry in Motion," in which she illustrates poems with animation. The first of the series, "Life Jacket," won best animation at the Adobe Digital Cinema Festival in 2001. It can be viewed on the web at www.adobe.com/festival/popup/lifejacket.html. Pay close attention to the scenes of flowing water in "Life Jacket." Talenti says they're experimental precursors to the viscous animation in "The Planets."

Independent Television Service (ITVS) has underwritten this series, and "I Reason," an animation of Emily Dickinson's poem, can be found on the ITVS web site at www.itvs.com/search/preview.htm?showID=805.

Talenti received her bachelor's degree from Brown University and her master's from the University of Southern California. She came to Carolina in December 2001.

She teaches narrative production, animation and screen writing and equates teaching narrative filmmaking to teaching English composition: "Everybody is required to take it, and my ideal would be that everyone would have to be able to put a piece of media together," she says. "It is just another language."