Suspended Abbey

Film by Nicole Tostevin, 16mm/Computer Animation, 14:00. 1991

“This well-executed mix of animation and graphic techniques illuminates the relationship of art, architecture, and ideology. Using only a Macintosh personal computer, this work incorporates the advances in multimedia computer graphics that push the frontier in motion picture imaging.”
-American Film & Video Association.

FILM SYNOPSIS

A shimmering, dreamlike journey through a computer-animated mediæval monastery, where the Gothic landscape seamlessly flourishes and deteriorates before your eyes.  Both haunting and beautiful, the majestic ruins echo with ghostly voices that whisper an eternal and timeless question.

CREDITS

Director, Producer, Photography, Computer Animator: Nicole Tostevin
Music composition: David Javelosa
Vocals: Becky Allen 

I made Suspended Abbey as my MFA graduate thesis film while at California Institute of The Arts in 1991. The film was made by animating digitally manipulated still photographs on a Macintosh computer and then filming each frame off the computer screen with a 16 mm camera. The illusion of the monastery is a result of an electronically produced collage of many differing photographs from various monasteries, abbeys and cathedrals. I took most of the original photographs while traveling in Britain. Although the majority of the architecture is based on Tintern Abbey in Wales, I reconstructed the ruins by painting in windows, doors, walls and roofs in order to return the abbey to its 13th century condition. The animation follows the restored abbey through erosion and decay into a modern day ruin.

I hope to one day digitize the film for online viewing but for now, the memory of the film on the big screen will have to do since I can’t stomach the idea of seeing it on a small device.