Left-Handed (2002)

A student film I'm very proud of.

The round hole...the square peg. If neither bends, which will break?

A left-handed boy is just beginning school. In 1979 China, conformity is a matter of survival, so his teacher convinces his father to correct his 'problem' for the boy's own good.

At home and at school, the boy struggles to understand his place in the world, guided only by the sage advice of an ambidextrous street-corner barber.

Then one day, his father sprains his right wrist in a bicycle accident...

Left-Handed Canada, 2002, 10 min

Cast

Daniel Yan, Arthur Cheng, Xiao-Ming Yu, Xingfa Zhang, Fu Yu

Crew
Director: Baoqi Ye
Producer: Alison Humphrey
Screenwriter: Baoqi Ye & Alison Humphrey
Editor: Peter Yu
Cinematographer: Jeff Maher
Original Score: Kirk Elliott
Sound: Rob Turi
Design: April Viczko

Produced in the Sheridan College Advanced Television and Film program, 2002.

Distribution: The Movie Network, Air Canada, Cathay Pacific Airlines, Facets.org.

Awards
2004 Chicago International Children's Film Festival – Montgomery Prize Certificate of Excellence, Best Film or Video by an Emerging Director, Baoqi Ye.
2003 Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards – Best Cinematography, Student Category, Jeff Maher.
2003 WorldFest Houston – Gold Award, Graduate Level Student Production
2002 Anchorage International Film Festival – Best Super Short Film

About the Director
Baoqi Ye graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai, receiving his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Industrial Design. Ye worked for Ogilvy & Mather Advertising Shanghai first as Art Director, then as Creative Group Head. He has created dozens of commercials for clients like Vespa Scooters, Siemens Home Appliances and Beck's Beer. The Beck's campaign won both Gold and Silver medals in the Times International Chinese Advertising Awards organized by Taiwan Times Newspaper.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361824/

Sensorium Seminar

Bring your lunch to the Loft! I'll be talking about my research-creation project, Shadowpox, this Wednesday at Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University. Here's the flyer:

Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series

Wednesday, February 26, 2020
11:30am-12:30pm 
The Sensorium Research Loft
4th Floor CFA, Room M333
RSVP to sensinfo@yorku.ca 
 

Please join us for our next Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series featuring Cinema and Media Arts PhD Candidate and Sensorium Graduate Research Associate, Alison Humphrey!

Alison Humphrey plays with story across drama, digital media, and education. As a Vanier Scholar in Cinema and Media Arts at York University, her research-creation doctoral dissertation explores how a participatory science fiction storyworld, Shadowpox, can help young people build scientific, civic and media literacy by exploring immunization and vaccine hesitancy through a superhero metaphor.

The project’s first phase, full-body videogame, debuted during the 70th World Health Assembly in Geneva, where The Lancet called it “one of the most powerful and playful ways to illustrate both the individual and population-level implications of community immunity.” The second phase is a networked superhero narrative, The Cytokine Storm, co-created with young artists on three continents.

Lazola Nkelenjane (left) and Zanele Melapi experiment with solar-powered visual effects in a 2019 Shadowpox workshop at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre, Masiphumelele, South Africa.

The third phase adapts this narrative into a Scalar-based online platform for a “courseplay”, a hybrid undergraduate seminar that weaves academic study with dramatic composition and digital production. Science & Fiction: Imagining Immunity in an Immersive Storyworld (which will be offered in York's department of Cinema and Media Arts in the coming academic year) takes a new approach to the concept of experiential education: action refraction, where students use metaphoric world-building and digitally augmented role-play to explore one of the thorniest political dilemmas of public health: voluntary participation in the collective good.

For more, please see www.alisonhumphrey.com and www.shadowpox.org.

How "Citizen Science Fiction" Can Boost Immunity

Life Sciences Building, York University (NXL Architects) 

I'll be presenting a talk on Shadowpox as part of the York Circle Lecture and Lunch on Saturday, September 28 in the Life Sciences Building on York University's Keele Campus. The event is free – you can RSVP on the York Circle website.

Here's the précis:

Shadowpox: How "Citizen Science Fiction" Can Boost Immunity

Alison Humphrey will discuss how her research-creation project, Shadowpox, a participatory storyworld exploring immunization through a superhero metaphor, can help young people build scientific, civic and media literacy. A full-body Shadowpox videogame debuted during the 70th World Health Assembly in Geneva, where The Lancet called it “one of the most powerful and playful ways to illustrate both the individual and population-level implications of community immunity."

The other three presentations sound fascinating:

Your Brain in Action
Denise Henriques - Professor, School of Kinesiology & Health Science 

Humans surpass all other animals and robots when it comes to the diversity and malleability of movements produced — we are the world’s most versatile movers. Dr. Denise Henriques explains how the brain’s remarkable control systems make this possible. 

Transgender Studies: What You Should Know & Why It Matters
Sheila L. Cavanagh - Associate Professor of Sociology 

This presentation will introduce you to the burgeoning field of transgender studies. Transgender studies is based on the experiences of those who identify as transgender. Transgender is an umbrella term that includes everyone who is, in some way, gender diverse or gender non-conforming including, but not limited to, transsexuals, bi-genders, non-genders, Two-Spirits, etc. Transgender studies is not only concerned with the study of transphobia (discrimination against people who are differently gendered), but with questions relating to sex and gender embodiment. 

And this one is especially timely the morning after Toronto's #FridaysForFuture Climate Strike. I only wish I weren't speaking at the same time!

Is a 100% Renewable Energy Future Possible? Advances for Community Participation in a Low-Carbon Energy Transition
Dr. Christina Hoicka - Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies 

Over 80 percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are energy related and Canadians are among the highest per capita energy users and GHG emitters. Under the Paris Climate Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming by 2°C, Canada committed to a 30 percent reduction below 2005 levels of GHG emissions by 2030. However, scientists now caution there are clear benefits to keeping warming to 1.5°C, requiring an acceleration of carbon mitigation activities. This talk discusses the important factors to acceleration of a low-carbon energy transition, such as the innovation-diffusion of low-carbon energy innovations for communities, made up of individuals, households and organizations, to adopt, as well as diversity and inclusion in the energy and innovation sectors.

The Biology of Story

I'm thrilled to be joining Amnon Buchbinder's rich and profound course The Biology of Story as a teaching assistant this autumn.

Check out the first lecture clip below, then head over to the course website and the innovative, interactive Biology of Story documentary for more:

"What if there was magic? A mysterious power, hidden in plain sight, all around us, touching us, touched by us – daily. Wouldn't we want to learn how this magic works? How to work with it, consciously and effectively. How to ensure that it works for the benefit of ourselves, our communities, our world. How to use this magic to cast good spells – and to break the bad ones. 

Well, that magic, that mysterious power, does exist. Its name is Story."

Communications, Transformations, Futures

I'm heading to the University of British Columbia on Unceded Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm) Territory this week for the 2019 Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory conference.

HASTAC is "an interdisciplinary community of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and technologists changing the way we teach and learn." This year's conference theme is "Decolonizing Technologies, Reprogramming Education," and there are some inspiring plenary speakers lined up, including Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Karyn Recollet, and Elizabeth LaPensée.

I'll be part of a panel titled Communications, Transformations, Futures, presenting a talk on "Building Co-Immunity in Wiikwemkoong and Masiphumelele: Participatory Science Fiction to Inoculate the Civic Imagination." If you're in Vancouver on Friday, come say hi!

Rappin' at the Research Meeting

Huge thanks to the inspiring team at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation for the opportunity to present at their research meeting yesterday at the University of Cape Town's Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine.

Happening now! @alisonhum presents on her #participatory #sciencefiction #storytelling #Shadowpox project with @DTHF_SA at @UCT_news @UCTIDM Institute of Infectious Disease & Molecular Medicine Centre #immunize #VaccinesWork #masiphimelele #cowpox #smallpox pic.twitter.com/PamxIBjJHJ

— Jenn Warren (@jennwarren) March 15, 2019

Thanks too to talented photographer and communications consultant Jenn Warren for documenting the talk!

We do not live in isolation! Your #immunity is part of the community. @alisonhum talks #shadowpox, #Participatorystorytelling for #research, Superhuman embodiment, projection and protection, and the #Cytokine storm #coimmunity #community @DTHF_SA @UCT_news @UCTIDM @yorkuniversity pic.twitter.com/5uriXv4dO0

— Jenn Warren (@jennwarren) March 15, 2019

On location at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre

Photographer and communications consultant Jenn Warren joined our Shadowpox group recently at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre in Masiphumelele, Cape Town, and took some beautiful shots. Pictured: Sibulele Bontshi, Abongile Maputhuma, Buhle Mavi, Zanele Melapi, Lazola Nkelenjane, Asiphe Ntshongontshi and Aphiwe Zabezolo.

Click on images to enlarge (and check out more behind-the-scenes photos here).

Bongo Mavi, with Alison pretending to be his cell phone

Zanele Melapi 

Lazola Nkelenjane

Abongile Maputhuma

Alison, Abongile, Zanele and Lazola in the "EduZone" computer lab

Discussing the next scene...

Superhero Cellphone Cinema

As a warm-up to our Shadowpox video workshop, participants including the Youth Interns of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre in Masiphumelele, Cape Town, wrote, directed, shot and assembled their own superhero storyboards using Comic Life. Huge thanks to Plasq for generously donating the software to the Youth Centre's EduZone computer lab!

Created by and starring: Sibulele Bontshi, Abongile Maputhuma, Buhle (Bongo) Mavi, Zanele Melapi, Lazola Nkelenjane, Asiphe Ntshongontshi and Aphiwe Zabezolo.

Click on images to enlarge (and check out more behind-the-scenes here).

Aphiwe Zabezolo (in character) arriving at the DTHF Youth Centre

Asiphe Ntshongontshi casting a solar-powered shadowpox effect on Zanele

Lazola, Sibulele, Asiphe, Zanele and Bongo

Glimpse/Blink at the University of Cape Town

The University of Cape Town's renowned Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies "teaches dance and theatre performance as modes of critical inquiry, creative expression, pedagogy and public engagement." 

Veronica Baxter is a leading scholar of social and applied theatre and drama and of practice-as-research in South Africa, so I was thrilled when she extended an invitation to share a Shadowpox "Glimpse/Blink" workshop with her students. 

Thanks to Prof. Baxter and everyone at UCT for their warm welcome and their shadow-fuelled flights of imagination! 

Building Black Panther

For last week's Cellphone Cinema workshop at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre, I put together a collection of links and videos on the making of the film Black Panther.

Early storyboards for the ancestral plane sequence by artist Simeon Wilkins:
http://www.storyboardsinc.com/boards/view/id/215/sectionId/2/categoryId/0/#9750

(click image above to enlarge)

An animatic is a video showing how the panels from a storyboard would look as a sequence of shots. Here are a few from Simeon Wilkins, starting with the ancestral plane sequence above:

And why not, here’s storyboards for T’Challa’s first trip to the Ancestral Plane #BlackPanther #WakandaForever #MarvelCinematicUniverse pic.twitter.com/Hh0buIVzlq

— Simeon Wilkins (@SimeonWilkins1) February 18, 2018

(Click below for more...)

Brainstorm profiles Shadowpox

Brainstorm is a monthly newsletter published by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation at York University. Megan Mueller, senior manager of research communications, wrote a wonderful profile on Shadowpox:

Interactive video game highlights the impact of vaccine decision-making
https://yfile.news.yorku.ca/2019/02/07/interactive-videogame-highlights-the-impact-of-vaccine-decision-making/

The piece also included a new video with Steven J. Hoffman, the scientific director of Shadowpox: The Antibody Politic (among his many other titles):