New First Full Last
Design, animation and music by Bran Dougherty-Johnson
"Consider everything an experiment." – Sister Corita Kent
About
New First Full Last is an original short film by Bran Dougherty-Johnson inspired by lunar cycles and their effect on tides. A quiet and meditative exploration of the feeling of standing on the shore watching moonlight on water. Not wanting the moment to pass by too quickly.
“I used watercolor to do a series of monochromatic paintings, then cut them up into little 2”x2” squares. Photographing each of those and sequencing them led to an organic flickering texture that became the basis for this project.”
Embracing the idea from Sister Corita Kent to “consider everything an experiment,” Bran created different shapes and patterns with the watercolor textures – exploring ways for the shapes to rise and fall, cycle and loop. What starts off as a simple motif through layering and repeating builds into a complex array of rhythms and patterns. The hand-animated words used throughout the piece are the names of the four phases of the moon, alongside the words ‘cycle’ and ‘love’ – modular words that can recombine, switch order and meaning.
The original audio was recorded with a patch made in VCVRack, an open-source modular synthesizer simulator using both sequenced and randomly-generated voices.
