Jos Meijers

After graduating as a director from the bachelor Audio-Visual Design with honours in 2007, I worked as both independent filmmaker and freelance director, editor and sound designer as well as a film teacher at several Dutch academies. I worked on a lot of different projects, from live-action short films to documentaries and animations to dance films. I started the Master of Animation in 2015 in order to further expand my audio-visual vocabulary. During the course I experimented with the use of different narrative strategies, abstract animation and with combining animation with my background in live-action filmmaking. Having had the freedom to be able to experiment meant a great deal to me.
I graduated from the Master with honours with a 4-channel video installation, titled “Fu-Go”, which combines live-action, animation and dance and provides a spatial cinematic experience. 

Alongside the process of developing my graduation project, I reflected on my creative process, which involved a lot of both theoretical and practical research, and tried to draw universal insights from it. One of the important questions asked myself was: How does what I make and think influence how I make and think (and vice versa)?
From my research I also observed that a lot of audio-visual works I can relate to, are poetic. But what makes a work poetic? How can I make something poetic and, maybe more importantly: why would I want to? In my research report “How to Get to You” I try to give implicit answers to these questions.

Concerning the content of my graduation project “Fu-Go”; I started out from the documentary story of over 9000 Japanese balloon bombs that were launched at the end of World War II. These unmanned balloons carried explosives from Japan all the way to North America in order to cause casualties and panic by dropping their payloads without warning or sound on a random part of the country and population. I see this strange kind of threat very much related to contemporary situations, such as potential terrorist attacks and people dealing daily with deathly drones hovering their homes in today’s war zones. How can we cope and carry on with our lives, even though we know deep down that something dangerous can happen? This I translated into the experience of the installation.