Wave Form

WAVE FORM explores movie viewing, sharing, and making as a means of confronting the experience of mental illness. It illuminates the sustaining, transformative powers of film by transforming a variety of “waves” from cinematic history—ocean waves, waving hands, waves of soldiers—through the luma waveform scope, a technical feature of movie editing software. Converted into luma waveforms, the original filmic images are rendered unrecognizable, their representational nature exchanged for a ghostly, mesmerizing shimmer.

Through these transformations, WAVE FORM’s narrator, Luma, introduces the filmmaker’s struggle with depression and suicidal ideation, only to then meditate lyrically upon how the filmmaker has been preserved, sustained, and inspired by the movie as wave: as greeting, as lifting height, as surface with nourishing depth. The array of cinematic waves Luma names—the spectral renderings ranging from JAWS to MUSTANG to LA DOLCE VITA, from MOONLIGHT to CLOSE-UP to THE GLEANERS AND I—are hauntingly defamiliarized, made stunningly new, as their solid figures dissolve in an aurora borealis-like dance.

WAVE FORM is a testament to the curative power of film, and creativity itself. Above all, it is a film about belief—belief in our creations to express and connect us, and belief in ourselves to create and endure.

  • Tiz (Daniel Tysdal)
    Director
  • Tiz (Daniel Tysdal)
    Writer
  • Tiz (Daniel Tysdal)
    Producer
  • Margaret Brock
    Key Cast
    "Luma"
  • Tom Upjohn
    Composer
  • Scott McCrorie
    Sounds Effects Editorial / Re-Recording Mixer
  • Dudley Scott Audio Post Group Inc.
    Post Production Audio Supplied by
  • Tiz (Daniel Tysdal)
    Editor
  • Mara Nesrallah
    Vocalist
  • Alex Samaras
    Vocalist
  • Ryanne Kap
    Font Consultant
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    8 minutes 17 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 29, 2020
  • Production Budget:
    3,500 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Tiz (Daniel Tysdal)

Tiz (aka Daniel Tysdal) is a poet, teacher, and filmmaker. His short films include HUMANITY'S WING and WAVE FORM, and have screened at festivals in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. He is the ReLit Award winning author of three books of poetry, the poetry textbook THE WRITING MOMENT: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO CREATING POEMS (OUP), and the TEDx talk “Everything You Need to Write a Poem (and How It Can Save a Life).” He teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Put simply, my artistic practice is rooted in my struggle with clinical depression and suicidal ideation. This struggle is what drove me to create and creating is what kept me alive. This experience, thus, fuels my passion for and belief in the arts, and underpins my artistic practice at the level of content and form.

At these two levels, then, WAVE FORM branches out from my previous work as a filmmaker and writer. In terms of content (subject, experience, emotion), WAVE FORM is a new approach to my previous work to bear witness to, and delve deeply into, the complexities of a life lived with mental illness, its debilitations and visions, its caverns and its ecstasies, probing the personal and the communal, the historical and the speculative. In terms of form (practice, tradition, medium), WAVE FORM, like my previous work, is guided by the belief that explorations of experiences of mental illness require an experimental impulse—bending convention, hybridizing forms, multiplying perspectives, and so on, as a means of finding new ways to articulate an experience that is seemingly inexpressible and, thus, mis-represented, stigmatized, and willfully misunderstood.

In this sense, I hope WAVE FORM stands as a distinct contribution to the growing interest in making art that aims to be quality, memorable art while also working to counter the silence and stigma around mental illness. This is a core component of my work as a writer and teacher, with my most publicly facing examples being my TEDx Talk, “Everything You Need to Write a Poem (and How It Can Save a Life)” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0BUYzMypi8), and my personal essay in The Walrus, “How TIFF Helped Save My Life” (https://thewalrus.ca/tiff-is-more-to-me-than-a-film-festival/). Like these works, Wave Form arises out of the recognition that we need more candid creations on the realities of mental illness and the role art can play in our survival.