Louisa Sage

Louisa Sage is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Montreal. She works with puppet animation, music performance, composition, painting and drawing. As an animation student she worked with cut-outs, paint on glass and stop-motion animation, and her films were shown in festivals in Ottawa and Taiwan. Professionally, she collaborates with other animators and independent filmmakers where she specializes in prop construction, colouring, animation and editing. She is regularly active in different musical configurations including various marching bands, a four-piece rock band called Black Magic Woman, and a mutating party band called Your Highness, and has performed variously for Mardi Gras in New Orleans, at weddings, at bars and loft spaces between Montreal and Mobile, Alabama, and in the streets of Montreal.

Project Outline:
A Studio XX Commission :: Projects using Open Source
Digital Autonomy and Activism :: Multimedia design on Linux

“My project is a short narrative video that combines live action footage with stop-motion animation; the video has three alternate soundtracks – each triggered by a different button which the viewer can touch at any time. Beyond the desire to convey a story using visual media, my purpose in making the video is to experiment in the ways the soundtrack to a movie can change the mood and meaning of a story. I arrived at this idea in part while making short video narratives and having to decide on the initial style of acting, and also the subsequent dialogue overdubs. This project is a chance to try more than one option at a time, to keep the editing open and interactive, and to entertain.

I will realize my project using open source software learned from workshops at StudioXX including GIMP for visual effects and matting, Ardour for sound recording and mixing, and Pure Data, facilitated by an Arduino, for the physical computing between the audio/video timeline and the trigger buttons.”