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Beware of Pedestrians
Pedestrians express contradictory responses.
Beware of Pedestrians. Film, b/w 16mm
Conceived in 1992, made in 1994, and launched in 1995 in the exhibition Beware of Pedestrians at Gallery 101 Melbourne, and then screened at the 44th Melbourne International Film Festival and the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Music: David Wells and Merophie Carr
Image transfer: David Atkinson, RMIT
Sound engineering: Barry Jones
Funding: Australian Film Commission New Image Research
Sponsor: Autodesk
Animation generated using IBM and Amiga systems with Autodesk Animator pro and Deluxe Paint IV software. Digital files rephotographed frame by frame to 16mm film.
Beware of Pedestrians is a procession, a parade, a march, an architectural ballet of shapes and non-gender figures moving left to right across a black screen. Animated white lines reveal a polymorphic form: a model used in osteopathy to analyse human movement. Figures move through the accordion music and drum beats of David Wells and Morophie Carr, exploring space and time and energy in the weightless world of a digital stage.
Lisa Roberts,
Beware of Pedestrians exhibition catalogue, 1995
ISBN 0 646 24336 5
The closest reference points to the visually unique style of computer animation that Lisa has developed seem to be that hand drawn direct on film work of filmmakers such as Norman McLaren and Len Lye (see 'Free Radicals".) Lisa has herself worked extensively in this area.
Over the last twenty years Lisa has drawn upon her training in dance and incorporated this into her film work, such as "Still Lifes" in the late 70's and "Morrish Dance" in the late 80's. "Beware of Pedestrians is a further exciting development of her interest in dance and film.
Michael Buckley, Multimedia artist
Melbourne, 1995
Coming from a painting tradition, Lisa Roberts can be described as one of the most promising of New Age artists.
In this work she explores her interest in the animated image, by way of computer and electronic imaging in the tradition of cubism and constructivist, as the natural accompaniment of sound.
Roger Palmer,
the 44th Melbourne International Film Festival Programme, 1995
See Beware of Pedestrians art work
greenleft. June 7, 1995. Issue 190
44th Melbourne International Film Festival 1995
By Bronwen Beechey
The 44th Melbourne International Film Festival begins on June 8, screening more than 200 films from 28 countries. The centenary of cinema will be a theme of the festival, which will begin with a restored print and newly commissioned score for the Australian silent classic The Sentimental Bloke.
Other retrospective screenings under the centenary banner include rare Czech silents, Japanese animation and little-known Indian films of the 1960s.
Special events include Australia's first environmental film and video program. Films include Ecological Design: Inventing the Future; Ross Gibson's Wild, which examines the way that environments shape our history; and Taxi to Timbuktu, an examination of the social and environmental impact of global economics on the small African country of Mali.
Other films of interest include Antonia Bird's controversial Priest; Dust of Life, a French/Algerian/Vietnamese co-production set in the period following the liberation of Saigon in 1975; Michael Handke's 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, another examination of alienation and violence from the Austrian director of the chilling Benny's Video; and US director Charles Burnett's The Glass Shield, billed as a "thinking person's cop-thriller", about a black rookie posted to an intolerant inner-city station.
On a lighter note are Canadian director Patricia Rozema's lesbian romance, When Night is Falling, and the eagerly awaited Ed Wood, Tim Burton's biography of the cross-dressing Z-grade film director. Documentaries include Crumb, the story of US underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and his "positively psychotic" family and Carmen Miranda: Bananas is my business, examining how Hollywood manipulation and greed destroyed the Brazilian actor.
New Australian films include John Ruane's (Death in Brunswick) adaptation of Tim Winton's novel, That Eye the Sky, Aleksi Vellis' The Life of Harry Dare and Alan Madden's black comedy Mushrooms.
The festival runs from June 8 to June 25, at the Astor, Kino and Valhalla Cinemas and the State Film Theatre. For programs, screening details and bookings, ring (03) 9417 2011.
