Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Laser surgery, or film destruction?

Group project where each person got a few seconds/feet of a found film about lasers and had their crazy way with it, incorporating various handmade techniques* in working directly on the footage-- then we spliced it back together in order more or less, like this:
*scratching, spray painting, chemicals, magazine transfers, rub-on letters, hole-punching, and even photograms!! (also see posts under 'March' for similar examples...)

9 comments:

Annie said...

When i first saw my segment I saw the eye, straight away. It is the part where the man talks about the ses of lasers. Well, I thought it seemed rather like the movie "Fire in the Sky," which made me think it was some sort of crazy torture film (and I thought "...um, creepy..." and proceeded to have nightmares, but I'm told I don't get extra credit for anguish. Shame.) so I wanted it to half a fairly horrific feel, and taking out the torturer, making them a nonentity, seemed scary to me. Like zombies. Also, scratching on film, which is what I did, is something I particuloarly enjoy, so there you have it.

I scratched on film. Whoo!

Anonymous said...

I tweaked the shot, 'sitting suit with no head'. Using a small hole punch I just punched out his out his face in each frame so it would appear as some informative speech about lasers were coming out of nowhere. Splicing it into the class loop upside down, the optical track also reads backwards making it sound like it is decoding some satanic message in a led zeppelin song. It was an unusually small hole punch because a reg. one almost punches out an entire 16mm frame.

JT Hammett said...

My strip included the title card for the acronym "Laser" near the end of the film. The reason I originally chose to use this shot, was for the strip's very graphic image just from a faraway glance. I knew this would present a good opportunity for scratching and visual play on the film.

I used a combination of scratching, paint, ink and rub on decals of text to animate an otherwise static boring set of words into a chaotic flicker-style scene in our collaboration film.

Rice said...

My segment of the film (the first in the video) was the result of a treatment I had been developing for film. The treatment is a three step process in which the film is treated with a common house hold item, and then placed through a Myruatic acid bath, followed by a Bleach bath (the combination of which produces Chlorine gas, in can anyone wants to know).

Before I developed the piece, I had tried various techniques and test before hand. However, after I had processed the piece you see in the film, It was to my surprise that the emulsion was perfectly intact afterwards, unlike every other piece I had processed. Why? I have no clue. Perhaps it has to do with the type of film stock the print was made on, or perhaps it was just my chemicals.

As a result, I reprocessed the piece, and ended up with the emulsion far more dissolved than I had originally intended, but oh well.

Anonymous said...

I wish that I had done more with the title sequence. I burned mostly the optical track, but it wasn't that noticable. The rest wore magazine transfers and a magic marker.

lindsay said...

I was disappointed in my portion of the project. I spent a decent amount of time etching into 3 or 4 frames at a time. The result was nothing as I had originally thought it would be and I was not impressed. I attempted to mimic the strip of film we passed around in class. It failed.

Brian swenson said...

my section starts with his hand and ends with a worm/scratch going out of his mouth around the frame and back into his mouth. my inspiration came from scratch man 2. starting with his hand i spent a lot of time trying to scratch out his fingers except for the middle one so as to make it look like he is giving everyone the 'bird', then i proceeded to alternate a globe and a peace sign which then got bigger and bigger, then imploded on itself in his hand. i drew in a lot of question marks to show that i had no idea what was going on in the film strip and to say to myself and the audience that i had no idea what i was doing or what direction i was trying to go in. i used a 7x lumiloupe, a razor blade and some warm water to scratch into the soundtrack and the individual frames. i did not use bleach because i wanted to still see the layers of emulsion.

kennedy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
kennedy said...

i wasn't really sure what i was going to do for my segment but when i looked at my piece i realized i would be a good segment to practice to scratching techniques. for the scratching i used kind of a metal tipped pencil and got the film wet before i scratched into it. the first thing i did was to play with a flicker effect; i scratched out the figure of the guy and his name every other frame. then i played with some line motion. after that i was looking at this guy and started to feel sorry for him because he was completely helpless in the frame so i scratched in "help me", then i saw that there was a slight zoom going on in the frame so i wrote "im" and made it get progressivly bigger just as he himself was doing in the frame. i sort of play on words, "im" getting bigger, get it? then i had some fun and drew glasses and a wig that grew out of control on the guy. then i finished my original thought and scratched in "trapped and i cant get out" scrolling left to right on the frame. overall i liked what i did and now feel more comfortable with my scratching abilities.