Abstract
“Using Surrealist Aesthetics to Explore a Personal Visual Narrative about Air Pollution”, is a practice-based research project focusing on the production of a poetic short film that incorporates surrealist aesthetics with motion capture and digital simulation effects. The project explores surrealist aesthetics using visual effects combined with motion capture techniques to portray the creator’s personal experiences of air pollution within a poetic short film form. This research explicitly portrays this narrative through the filter of the filmmaker’s personal experience, deploying an autoethnographic methodological approach in the process of its creation. The primary thematic contexts situated within this research are surrealist aesthetics, personal experiences and air pollution. The approach adopted for this research was inspired by the author’s personal experiences of feeling trapped in an air-polluted environment, and converting these unpleasant memories using a range of materials, memories, imagination, and the subconscious mind to portray the negative effects of air pollution. The overall aim of this process was to express my experiences poetically using a surrealist aesthetic, applied through the medium of an animated short film.
