A Dozen Ways is another piece that takes a creative and amusing tack to address current affairs. It’s also an example of a short that charmingly and engagingly fuses narrative voice-over with well composed images. Applying a light touch to its heavy subject - the economic downturn – A Dozen Ways tosses the egg around as a metaphor and playfully keeps it in the air from start to finish, all the while riffing on familiar egg aphorisms. Writer-director Andrea D. Mann’s quirky angle of approach is in the spirit of the creative ethos that Mirai, the video’s heroine, discovers is the silver lining in her unexpected misfortune. Mann calls A Dozen Ways “a simple, humourous contemplation of ways to live that enthusiastically embrace the present moment – which only exists as temporary peace and order between the inevitable major and minor crashes that disrupt even our best-laid plans.”Andrea N. Mann
Andrea N. Mann is a visual artist working in film, video and animation. Her background in painting, printmaking, installation, photography and writing provided the foundation for a very organic evolution toward her current and, she feels, lasting fascination with time-based media. Mann has an insatiable appetite for knowledge and a particular interest in psychology and cultural anthropology, but she leaves room for herself to explore other topics of observation, contemplation and reverie in her art as well. Her other media works include Lessons of the Fur Factory (2009), Sons and Fathers, Atlantis Project, Work Day (2007), Living it Through (2006), and Ten Cent Tip (2004). For Mann, the practice of her art is not just a creative and intellectual pursuit, but an ongoing rebellion against what she considers two powerful conditions of our time: alienation and apathy.