Week
Six: My Experience With Assignment One:
For
me, the scariest part of the film manipulation process in Assignment One was
that I was never quite sure how the results would look projected onto a
screen. However, this was also a fun
aspect of the process, because it gave me a little bit freedom to not over
think what I was doing and allowed myself to experiment and to think, “Hey,
we’ll see what happens!” I feel
that a more experienced filmmaker has a greater understanding of what their
film manipulation will look like once projected, because after projecting our
film, I feel like I learned a lot about the timing of the film and how certain
manipulations look once projected; it is almost like a trial and error way of
making a film. If you thought a
certain manipulation was going to look one way when projected and it didn’t,
then you can always go back and rethink what you did and try to tweak the
manipulation again.
One
of my favorite manipulation techniques was creating the Rayograms and the
contact printing. It was great fun
to be in a darkroom only lit by a red safelight and place random objects onto
the unexposed film and then flash the room lights on to expose the film. This was my first darkroom experience,
and it was awesome to get to soak the exposed film stock in the developer and
see the film develop before your eyes.
It is a magical process, and one that I wish to do more often from now
on.
A
couple of the objects that I exposed to the film that I particularly liked how
they turned out were the nuts and bolts and the pencil shavings. Andre instructed me to dip my film into
the developer for only a split second, so that when the film was fully
developed that the objects on the Rayograms would have a lava-like appearance,
and he was right! The nuts and
bolts especially looked like their images had been slightly warped. I would have never thought that by
quickly dipping the film into the developer that you could achieve such an effect,
and this kind of thinking has cause me to ask questions about how else I could
manipulate film during the exposing and the developing processes. I also really liked how the pencil
shavings turned out. I was
surprised how much of the pencil shavings’ rigid texture the brief exposure was
able to pick up. The contact
printing looked amazing; by laying a separate strip of film over the unexposed
film stock and then lifting it up and twisting it you are able to make it look
like the film is running of the reel when you are projecting the film.
I
was most worried how the frame animation would turn out. I have worked with key frame animation
on a computer before so I had an idea of how the animation would work, but I
had never drawn an animation frame by frame by hand before. It was definitely helpful in Andre’s
instructions to break down the animation by drawing the key frames as your
midpoints so that you where you will end up with your drawing. I made symbols to represent each of the
four elements, earth, wind, fire, and water. I was inspired by the symbols used to represent the four elements
in Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last
Airbender cartoon to make my own symbols. My symbols are simple in design to make them easy to
animate, and hopefully easy to tell which symbol represents which element. The idea behind the symbols was that I
wanted the symbols to morph into one another to cover all of the elements. I felt that the requirement of
animating 100 frames might make the animation go by too quickly, so I ended up
animating 300 frames, making each animation cycle 100 frames to create a
looping effect with the transformations in the animation. Andre also provided another helpful tip
when he suggested using your sharpie on both sides of the filmstrip so that you
get a solid dark line instead of a watery-looking line. All of these tips and making it a
300-frame animation made it turn out well and I was surprised and happy with
how it looked projected on screen.
I wish there were videos that I could watch that would explain Bårbel
Neubauer’s process that she goes through to make such complex animations like
in her film, “Passage,” that we watched in class.