From the under ten minute Flash Films to the Thug TV Series and Cultivate Empathy with Me Virtual Reality Multimedia Installation and the Uncanny Valley Girl Projects, Michelle's filmmaking style is unmistakably her own. She uses digital assets in ways they were never meant to be used to form the style of her cinema and graphic art.
Pinfeathers was screened in Seattle and favorably reviewed in The Stranger, Seattle Times, and the New York Times who described it as having "a Salammbô-like decadence ..." Pinfeathers received the silver plaque award from the Chicago International Film Festival. Pinfeathers is archived as part of the viewing library at Scarecrow Video in Seattle, Washington, the largest video and film archive in the United States. Scarecrow describes the film as "...disturbing and dream-like."
Pinfeathers was selected by AFI to be one of only 13 films included in the Tribeca Reframe AFI Collection.
Pinfeathers was the first short film at AFI to secure a contract with a distributor. The contract had to be built from scratch.
Pinfeathers is still watched and treasured by many.
Can an analog man find a place in the digital world?
Always honor the dignity of yourself and others. Hold yourself in high esteem and treat others with decency and compassion.
Based on real life transformations. Thug asks the question - how does a brutal, seemingly irredeemable thug find empathy? What are the micro-moments of making his way to compassion? Like Breaking Bad in reverse.
Mock-ups
Mood Boards
Character Interior & Exterior Lighting
Location Lighting
The Cultivate Empathy with Me installation is designed to go where there is deep division and conflict and collaborate with those communities on the installation.
Empathy can be seeded and you are the seed.
Words matter
Emergence pays tribute to Terrence McKenna whose support and inspiration influenced the course of Michelle's philosophy of consciousness. Michelle contends that the process of releasing imprints, conditioning, traumas, and indoctrination, is the how in Mckenna's idea of Emergence. She stresses that, without these "overlays," our actual self emerges. Not revealed, not exposed. There is emergence and sense of coming up for air, coming to the surface, coming into being.
Copyright © 2021 Michelle Espinosa - All Rights Reserved