Magazine Transfer

This week we transferred magazine images to film. We didn't get to watch them yet so I'm not sure how my part will look. However, I've been thinking about it since we did it and I think I went about it the wrong way. My natural inclination, having never done this before, was to create a kind of collage. I modeled the images I put together after a collage aesthetic. I superimposed a dog over Mitt Romney, making it look like Chuck Norris was talking to a dog; I took Hannah Montana and gave her one of John McCain's eyes and one of a rhinoceros; I put images of Herod's temple behind everything, had Cormac McCarthy sitting with Putin just above a family picture of the Marx brothers, and filled in blank spaces with images of Mars. The process of creating this collage was alot of fun and I essentially followed the concept of making a kind of pop culture mash up. I enjoyed the process alot and can't wait to see what it looks like, but I also think that having it cut up into strips makes it a whole different animal and I'm not sure how well it will work. I should have, I think, looked for material that would be interesting and/or evocative just seeing it in a sliver. The images of Mars could be very interesting, now that I think about it. I'm not sure what exactly they were because I didn't read the article but they looked like some kind of microscopic views of the surface of mars. The article (by John Updike, surprisingly) was, as far as I could gather, about the existence of water, ice, clouds, etc. on Mars. But I simply cut the different images into strips and placed them along the back of the nearly finished collage, so that they grabbed onto the empty spots on the tape and therefore created almost like a background or wallpaper effect. So, overall, I think even if the greater effect of mine is lost by having it cut up, it could still be interesting and I'll at least learn from it for next time. I'm both interested and excited to do this again with a more specific purpose or vision in mind. Besides I think the point of excercises like this is that you don't know what it will look until it's in the projector and it would take alot of practice to be able to predict what it would look like, not to mention if someone could predict it they would probably try to put together things they had never encountered before. That's the thing about experimental film: it always has to be pushing and doing something new and therefore it is limitless.