Week Three: My Cameraless Filmmaking Experience, So Far

Going into our 6X1 class, I had no previous experience with cameraless filmmaking, but over the last few weeks I have gained an understanding and appreciation for the aesthetics of cameraless filmmaking and how cameraless films are made.  My first experience with cameraless filmmaking started with the need-to-know basics:  splicing film and making film loops.  After all, most of the filmmaking we have learned to do so far in other classes has been digital filmmaking, so it has been very educational to work with actual strips of film, and in such a hands-on manner.

I would recommend that film studies students take this class as early as they possibly can in their academic career, because of the filmmaking comprehension you obtain by physically touching and manipulating the film itself.  With this class, it was the first time I had ever spliced film together, and it was a really exciting experience that was just too cool.  And then the next step was making a film loop, which went hand in hand with splicing the film (to my understanding, it is essentially the same thing).  But again, this was my first time making a film loop, and then I learned how to run the film through the projector.  All of this was a great experience and it made me want to work as a film projectionist like a few of the other students in the class.  Working with the different film stocks and the film projector made me realize all of their complexities in their construction, and this has been a fascinating experience as a result.

Some of the manipulation techniques I have worked with so far have been scratching and puncturing to mark the film, as well as, the application of oil and various colored inks to the film stocks.  Some of the film stocks I have worked with in class have been the 16mm clear leader and the print stocks.  It’s interesting to be able to see the sound recording alongside the images, outside of the perforations on the print stock.  I have not seen the film that I had applied the oils and inks to projected on screen yet, so I don’t know how it has turned out.  I have seen the film that I manipulated by scratching with pushpins and different types of sandpaper, and the results were very dynamic.  I found that when you create a repeated pattern in the scratching that the images could leave a real impression on you as opposed to a series of more random scratches.

The magazine transfer ended up being a really fun tool in our increasing arsenal of film manipulation techniques.  The range and variety of looks with magazine transfers is endless; from making vivid color patterns, to the difference in the hard edge look of cut images versus the frayed look of ripped images, to adding inks to the magazine images, etc.  The smaller the images the better with the magazine transfers.  I found a series of tiny “yes's and no's” in vertical columns, and they showed up quite when blown up on the projection screen, due to their patterned formation.  I also learned that the longer you soak your taped magazine images in hot water, the more vivid the colors will turn out once you make the transfer onto the film stock.  Now, I am looking forward to the next class in which I will learn how to photogram/rayogram and contact print on film. 

Week Two: Synesthesia (Art & Neurological) and Cymatics

I really enjoyed this week’s topic of synesthesia (neurological and in art) and cymatics.  The subjects go hand in hand, and I would say that cymatics are a form of synesthetic art.  Just for the sake of organizing my thoughts, I will go ahead and define these terms.  Synesthesia is the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body, which occurs involuntarily and automatically (This literally means joined sensations).  For example, a person with a synesthesia, called a synesthete, can hear music but also see it and/or feel it.  Also, in other forms of synesthesia, a person can see colors in numbers, letters, and words, or words can have flavors, and flavors can have color.  This is not any type of disorder, but it does mean that the person has certain senses connected that create an effect that is not normal for every person, but is normal for the synesthete.  Now, cymatics is process of visualizing sound, which some synesthetes actually do see sounds.

Synesthetes are more common than I ever knew.  It is reported that it’s possible that synesthesia is common in every 1 in 23 people.  I have never personally known someone with synesthesia, though.  It is possible that they don’t even know that he or she has it because the potency of synesthesia varies greatly from the people who have it.  I thought it was interesting that synesthesia is known to be hereditary, but we still know so little about it that we don’t know how it carries over in the genes especially when it is not the same type of synesthesia that is passed down in the family.

All of this information was new to me, as I had just vaguely heard of people having these types of cognition responses.  The type I had previously heard about was grapheme → color synesthesia, which is when individual letters of the alphabet and numbers are tinged with color, and this is the most common type of synesthesia.  I personally would find it very cool to have different colors associated with words or to be able to see colors when listening to music.  But it would be strange if different sounds and words had a flavor that I could actually taste, and this type of synesthesia is called lexical → gustatory synesthesia.

I find synesthesia fascinating, and I especially synesthesia’s relationship to the arts, with the some non- synesthete artists trying to replicate what a synesthetic experince would be like for an audience and synesthete artists who attempt to either draw, paint, etc. their own personal synesthetic perceptions to create their art.