Its incredible that many of the abstract films we had watched could be just random assignments in a visual effects course studying Adobe After Effects or Cinema 4D. For example, I found “Optical Poem” by Oskar Fischinger intriguing because of its smooth color palettes and rudimentary movement.
Optical Poem was created in 1937 as a short collaboration between John Cage and Fischinger himself. A stop motion animation approach was used to create continuity between each frame. The objects seen on screen are paper cutouts translated across a flat plane. Their movement was organized beforehand using graph paper on which Fischinger sketched their movements. Optical Poem has an accompanying sound track that is Franz Liszt’s Second Hungrarian Rhapsody, but it is not necessarily a synaesthesic piece in particular. The soundtrack is meant to emphasize the movement and serve as a basis for the idea of “Buddhist-inspired belief that all things have a sound” that Fischinger subscribes to.
Originally, Fischinger was a painter. He along with Wassily Kandinsky believed in the idea that non-objective imagery can communicate spiritually on the same abstract level of music. He pursued moving image because of its similarity to music in the fourth dimension of time, something that a static image cannot replicate in real time. Therefore, motivations for creating Optical Poem were to bridge this gap between visual and musical art.
Sources:
https://www.ideelart.com/magazine/oskar-fischinger