Cameraless Filmmaking

My experience with cameraless filmmaking so far has been a bit counterintuitive, to say the least. I've enjoyed everything so far, but the way my mind (and I think I can say that generally most people's mind work like this) works I create what is in front of me to look good in front me. So, for instance, when making the magazine cut outs, I tried to create an interesting collage, one where the images played off others in close proximity and the stressing the importance of spatial orientation and other aspects that certainly matter if you are looking straight at it but when cut into strips and played at 24 frames per second through a projector will have a completely different format, energy, and aesthetic. The same with the ink painting. I really enjoyed doing it and think I created some cool patterns and images. I liked experimenting with it, because the film didn't react like other substances to the ink, so that alone created a unique texture but then there was also the addition of the oil and painting with that. The way the oil seperated from the ink created unpredicatble patterns. It has hard working with these at first, especially with the oil (it was hard to even get it out of the bottle cap when mixed together because it kept seperating; eventually I had to just use two different bottle caps). It was also hard when they got onto the filn strip to have them do something I wanted to or for the ink to really show up at all. However with experimentation and continually throwing more and more ink down and then trying different combinations of ink and oil, it eventually stayed down and made an interesting image. Again, I'm pleased with how it eventually turned it, just at face value, but it will be a whole different thing once it is run through a projector and I'll be every interested to see what it is like. As far as the magaizine cut outs, we watched all of those but I couldn't even tell which ones were mine. I guess my images just weren't distinctive enough at that small scale. I also think I may not have gotten the pulp off correctly, but I don't really know so I'm not sure I'll be able to do much better next time. I guess I'll just keep experimenting. I'm interested to try the film development portion, because I haven't gotten to that yet.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is something that has interested me for a long time. Mostly I've been interesting in it in terms of music having some vision or visual experience attached to it. I like to listen to music by whole albums (or symphonies as the case may be) instead of just songs, and I like to wear headphones and listen in the dark with my eyes closed. On that note, I would love to invest in some good speakers because classical music especially sounds much better on speakers than on headphones and there are plenty of pop albums that I'm sure do too. Anyhow, I like to immerse myself in the music completely so that I can have visions. This is often an inspiration for writing or for seeing the beginnings of a film idea born in my head. I wrote a short story recently while listening to alot of Chopin's piano concertos and nocturns. It wasn't intentional. I was fed up with writing what I was writing and put it on to relax and not try to write. But within the music, prosaic sentences started to form and I started jotting them down, one short sentence every minute or so, but it eventually came along. From then on I listened to those pieces whenever I was adding to it, which was a long period of time. This isn't exactly synesthetic, I don't think, but it does derive one art from another. In another case, I had pushed myself to a physical extreme. I deprived myself of sleep, I starved myself, I went walking around smoking on a hot summer day. Then I came home and sat on the ground and put on some music. A few songs in I was hit with a vision that completely engulfed me. I wrote it all down afterwards. I've never had any experience so strong as that in seeing a film idea before my eyes. Hopefully if I ever make that film I'll have money so I can get the song I was listening to (it was a David Bowie song). Beyond that I still like to have conversations with my friends about what color a certain album or song is, or listen to music at night just before I fall asleep to let my mind wander into strange visions. One idea for an experimental film I had, which I saw completely in my mind as I listened to a song by a friend of mine, was to use paint dripping, or some other way of making black circles, on a film strip and run it through a projector, then record it and negate the colors. I'd love to try it sometime.

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.