Video Art: Visual Effects
Visual effects play a key role in enhancing the aesthetics of films, animations, video clips and multimedia projects, helping to give them greater depth and visual engagement. Software such as Adobe After Effects offer advanced tools for creating special effects, allowing you to simulate lights, shadows, particles, moving water, fire and other natural or abstract phenomena. However, when these effects are made exclusively digitally, they can come across as flat and lacking in depth.
To further enrich the visual effects, it is very interesting to combine real effects with digital ones, exploiting their interaction to achieve more complex and immersive results. This approach involves the physical creation of real elements, such as smoke, liquids, lights, or moving textures, which are then filmed and subsequently refined in post-production, using the advanced options offered by the software. in this way, the effects acquire greater visual richness and layering, offering new possibilities for intervention and transformation. The interaction between real and digital elements allows a wider range of modifications to be explored, giving the final result a deeper and more articulated dimension.
Le désir rattrapé par la queue
This project was carried out for the LAC in Lugano and concerned the promotion of the pièce teatrale Le désir attrapé par la queue, written by Pablo Picasso in 1941, during the German occupation of Paris. The work was born in a dramatic historical context: the city was under siege, the population lived in terror, and intellectuals gathered clandestinely in apartments to escape censorship and repression. It was under these circumstances that Picasso wrote the text, reading some passages in the company of friends such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Michel Leiris.
The piece of theater is an example of automatic and surrealist writing, dominated by dialogue with no apparent meaning and a fragmented narrative structure. The language oscillates between the grotesque and the absurd, reflecting the climate of oppression and alienation of those years. The characters, with bizarre and indefinite names, seem driven by irrational impulses, in a theatrical game that defies any conventional logic. A significant excerpt reads:
"The sky is tired, hunger has set its teeth on the floor, snow dances with shadows, and time has slipped into a shoe that is too tight."
This apparently meaningless writing lends itself to several interpretations: a cry of rebellion, an expression of anguish, or simply a language game reflecting the chaos of the period.
The event was held at the LAC in Lugano in collaboration with the Master of Arts in Physical Theater at SUPSI (University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland), Accademia Teatro Dimitri section. The goal of the promotional video was to evoke the dark and oppressive atmosphere of World War II while capturing the essence of Picasso's work. For this reason, I chose to accompany the images with words from the text, which appear randomly, reinforcing the feeling of disorientation and meaninglessness.
Technically, I used UV light-sensitive acrylic colors, illuminated with a special lamp, to create an intense and alienating visual effect. The various scenes were shot with a semi-professional video camera, and to pay homage to Picasso's painting, I experimented with dynamic brushstrokes, splashes of color and textural layering, recalling the expressive energy of this great artist's painting.”
The editing phase was done with Adobe After Effects, with the aim of building a dynamic and engaging rhythm. I integrated special effects that are not limited to digital post-production, but arise from physical interventions on the visual material, resulting in images charged with depth and emotionality.
