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Animated GIF

性的な魚 シリーズ
The Series of The Sexual Fish
Animated GIF, Quick Time movie  /  2014
 
Direction & Animation : Dino Sato
Music : Makoto Miyata   /  2014
Based Poem: “And I Lounged and Lay on Their Beds” /  Constantine P. Cavafy  / 1915
Special Thanks: Vassilis Boutos
 

 

This film "sexual fish" was inspired in 2013, when I was invited to an exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of C. P. Cavafy.

Cavafy is one of the representative Greek poets in the 20th century.

 

At that time, I had a great interest in making GIF animation.

Because I thought that the very, very short animation has the possibility as a new expression.

For many years, I have been making several animation shorts of about 5 minutes, but I wanted to know what could be expressed by the repetitive animation of a few seconds.

 

Cavafy composed many historical poems about ancient Greek and ancient Rome.

And as being a homosexual, he also wrote many poems about various sexualities as well.

As such, I started to make a series of GIF animations about immoral fishes based on the poem "And I Lounged And Lay On Their Beds".


Of course, I started this animation with fishes kissing.

And as I made erotic stimuli stronger and stronger, I gradually became to think of everything as an eros.

Even watching the suffering fishes in fishnets, I thought they were playing group sex, lacking morals.

 

 

When some GIF animations were completed, I had in mind how to display GIF animations in a gallery.

My idea was to use many small tablets, and displaying each GIF animation in each tablet.

But the gallery was in Greek, and I could not go there because of my schedule.

It is difficult to explain complex displaying, and it would need more budgets for many displays.

So, I decided to recompose a number of GIF animations into a movie with music.

 

At the same time, I held a workshop on making animation on Cavafy's poem in my university class.

These student films were also screened in Greek together with my film.

You can watch these films from the link below.

"Cavafy in TOKYO"

 

As I posted these GIF animations in some SNS and submitted to a contest, they received a prize, and were shared by many people.

 

I recognized, when we show works of the same theme on different media, we need to think of different ways of presentation.

Watching movies on a media like YouTube and viddsee differs from watching GIF animations in a browser that has various other information.

When watching movies, it is essential to focus only on the movie, because we need time to understand it.

Conversely, when watching GIF animations, since we can understand each animation in a few seconds, what we need is a fast Internet browsing environment to choose only good ones from a lot of works.

So, although we watch them both on a same PC monitor, our action for watching differs each other.

 

 

The next year, I thought of an idea of ‘endless producing movies’ and ‘continuous updating movies’.

If it were films or videos, it would be difficult to change after the completion in post-production.

But movies produced in entirely digital environment are easy to change any time, just like updating the software.

I was interested in what meanings such work would have.

 

Therefore, I added another fish episode to the movie I exhibited in Greek, and it was named "The sexual fish - The fish that forgot to breed", which can be viewed on viddsee now.

I call this ‘version 1.5’ like a software, and have submitted it to many film festivals as a master version.

Then, I wanted to take these GIF animated fishes outside, to Okinawa, the most southern island in Japan, and synthesized sexual fishes to the beautiful nature.

I called it ‘version 2.0’.

These works can be viewed from the link below.

"The Sexual Fish on the BEACH!"

I consider this series of works, several version movies and 2 collections of GIF animations, as one work.

 

Thank you for reading through to the end.

I hope my story will be useful for you.

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