Stephanie Maxwell is another handmade filmmaker currently employing digital media in order to push her vision into new territory. Maxwell relies on a variety of tools and brushes in her painted works, which she then rephotographs on a light table connected to a computer that acts as a digital frame capture. Utilizing software such as After Effects and Final Cut Pro, she crops frames, bends and folds existing imagery, layers images upon one another, creates motion effects, and shatters the picture plane like broken windows. The results are both startling and disorienting. The images in Runa’s Spell (2007) throb in a manner that would be impossible to achieve with optical printing. The film shakes, freezes, and restarts, as hand-painted abstractions swim under layers of jagged digital forms. Second Sight (2005) proffers a perpetual digital mist that is part painted film in the manner of Sistiaga, and part Jeremy Blake video-painting blur. The film’s title refers to powers of extrasensory perception, and here Maxwell collages photography of single-cell organisms with a maximalist layering of what appears to be a digitally produced sandstorm, challenging the viewer to make out recognizable images or to see beyond the clashing, hurtling pictorial elements. In addition, the film is set to a careening, digitally processed saxophone score that heightens the sense of disorientation and combines with the visuals to obscure as much as it reveals.