Night Hike
For The Love Of L.A.: "Night Hike" by Tempe Hale
Directed by: Tempe Hale
Director of Photography: Arlene Muller
Music by: Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum
Sound Designer & Re-Recording Mixer: Ben Huff
Production Assistance: Patricia Luna, Alex Brown
Artist Statement
Night Hike is a film noir-inspired experimental short constructed almost entirely from still photographs. A woman grappling with a recent loss goes for an evening walk. Coyotes howl and shadows play tricks on the eyes as she wanders deeper into the wilderness of Echo Mountain after dark. In this self-help thriller, touches of hard-boiled crime and dreamlike imagery reveal the woman's authentic self in a most unexpected way.
Biography
Tempe Hale is a Los Angeles-based director, animator, painter and Sundance Film Institute filmmaker Fellow (2020). Her work weaves together hand-drawn animations with archival footage and collage. Hale’s multimedia films have screened at The Pacific Symphony, Grand Performances, The Industry LA, Bay Area Rainbow Symphony San Francisco, Aloud Lecture Series at the Los Angeles Public Library, Big Apple Performing Arts and REDCAT. Her animated short Door No. 5 screened internationally at the Chitrakatha Festival (India), Expotoons (Argentina) and EICTV (Cuba).
In 2015, Hale began collaborating with Emmy- and GRAMMY-winning composer Laura Karpman. She created multimedia films using puppetry, collage and footage from Academy-Award winning cinematographer Greg Macgillivray to accompany Karpman’s symphonic piece “Siren Songs”, which premiered at Pacific Symphony’s 25th anniversary season finale on June 11th, 2015. In 2016, Hale collaborated on Karpman’s GRAMMY-winning multimedia project based on Langston Hughes epic poem “Ask Your Mama” featuring The Roots and Jessye Norman. In 2019, she worked with Digiscura creating multimedia films on native content for Huhugam Heritage Center in the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. In July 2020, Hale was selected as a participant in the Music in Animation Intensive Sundance Lab.
She graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 2014 with an MFA in experimental animation.
Curated by The Women's Center for Creative Work
Curator's Statement
"Over the past year, WCCW, like many arts and community centers, has had to meet the challenge of bringing our programming from a physical space into a digital one. When it came to selecting the artists and work to feature here, we wanted to create a process that would bring the same kind of community warmth as past events in our physical space, and that would provide a showcase of more than just three artists selected by us—because, as this project continues to bring to light, L.A. is bursting with smart, thoughtful, thrilling artists, making work that changes us. It also felt important that we invite our community to help us make those choices. So, we made an open call for proposals and hosted a digital event that we called L.A.'s Feminist Idol to show the proposals to the public. WCCW judges, Kamala Puligandla and Mandy Harris Williams, selected two projects and the third was selected by viewers.
Tempe Hale has made a haunting and visually stunning short film on loss and discovery, with photographs and hand-drawn animations."
