planets imagined
by Jason Smith

rancesca Talenti, assistant professor of communication studies, won an honorable mention at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival for her short animated film The Planets. Her inspirations? Cream in coffee, wisps of smoke — "patterns of organic chaos," as she describes them. To make The Planets, Talenti backlit a clear tray, filled it with liquid dyes and solvent, then turned the camera on as the dyes and solvent interacted. "It has taken me eight years to find just the right materials to capture these patterns on film," she says.

.: Pluto. Image by Francesca Talenti; click to enlarge. :.

Talenti finds herself drawn to animation. "Animation isn't even beholden to reality," she explains. "You get to create each frame from scratch. In a way, it gives you a more direct look into your imagination."

alenti shot The Planets using 35 millimeter film with an Oxberry animation camera. Normal movie cameras film at twenty-four frames per second, but the Oxberry shoots at six frames per second. "They say every obstacle is an opportunity," Talenti says. "Because of the Oxberry, I had to slow my motion way down. The result was a slightly unreal kind of movement, which I liked."

.: Venus. Image by Francesca Talenti; click to enlarge. :.

Independent Weekly movie critic David Fellerath called Talenti's film "a gorgeous — and unconventionally animated — rendering of the solar system in rapturously swirling colors." And how would Talenti describe her film? "Nine patterns, nine color fields, nine planets," she says. "One total trip."

Jason Smith is online designer and print production manager of Endeavors.
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