Dean extrapolated landscape images from 1920s Ford advertisements, leaving out the cars to focus on their representations of place and nature. She made the animation using a digital version of a multiplane camera technique employed in early Disney films to create an immersive and 3D illusion by separating two-dimensional images. This technique was itself inspired by Ford’s assembly line; Dean uses it to explore historical depictions of the American dream, exaggerating the subject matter’s fantastical style. [Overview courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art]
A 74-year old man sits at home listening to his radio when he settles onto a country-style song. He gets dressed up in boots, jacket and hat and heads down the road to his local pub. Its not the old west but it does have certain themes that seem familiar.
Young Harry Kenyon returns home to Tondo City after graduating college so he can help his rancher father drive a herd of cattle to the annual market, but a pair of outlaws - Cactus Ben and Tondo Bill - are planning to steal the herd for themselves.
John Mackley is in the hands of a money-lender, and a broken leg prevents him from meeting a note when due. He succeeds in putting off the payment until a future date, in the hope that better times will come in the interim. His wife and daughter, Lucy, comprise his family. Lucy, just budding into womanhood, has formed an attachment for a young man, who had rendered herself and mother a little service one day. They have met several times and love has become mutual. She knows nothing of his avocation or his past, only that he is living in the neighborhood.
The First Story is the first film in a trilogy of "westerns." Here the central idea is Power in its various forms, especially as seen overland in the quintessential American West: the big rigs on I 90 and the freight trains crossing Wyoming. It is the contrast of these machines to the broad landscape and animal life that digs at this mythological space and questions what other meanings might be created.
In the 1880's a ruthess gang of outlaws terroized the Southwest. These renegades were led by the notorious Bloody Jack Ryker and his top gun, Johnny Vermillion. Three men stood in their way. Stormy Lane and his two sidekicks, Cimarron Simmons and Texas Clapsaddle with the help of young Billy Wood pursue this band of cutthroats through the badlands of Texas.
A short student film about a lonesome cowboy in the 21st century attempting to prove his love to a teenage crush cowgirl, who recently falls into a coma.