film manipulation thus far

 

It is very liberating to know that imperfections can make a film strip aesthetically pleasing. Spilling and splattering oils liquids inks and paint all happen to be part of something I am pretty good at: making a huge mess. Only in this case, it involves doing something productive! How wonderful. Gathering little knick nacks for rayograms was really neat. I tried little nails, staples, a comb, ribbon, paperclips, beads, glitter, sugar, bobby pins, toothpicks, safety pins, clothes pins, rocks, bolts, hair clips, etc. After exposing and developing the film strips in the dark room I noticed that the smaller and thinner objects like the staples, nails, and glitter all turned out looking the best because the closer the object is to the film the more distinct the shape. The paperclips were noticeable as well. I think my favorite things were the staples that I used were the staples though, because you can arrange them in rectangular patterns that sort of give an impression of square shaped pixels. The sugar I used turned out looking interesting as well, it was sugar in the raw so the grains were bigger and more see through. I wonder what it would look like to use little tiny magnifying glasses on the film. I'm interested to see how the last batch with the sprocket holes turned out.

I'm thinking that the manipulation I work on will end up being pretty abstract, since it is our first time doing this. Making an animation like the one we watched on the first day must have taken forever! Something like that must be very tedious so I admire anyone who has the patience to do such a thing. Who knows, it could be like a meditation, drawing and scratching so many similar shapes over and over again. I look forward to trying to create a method to the madness. I’m going to take all the information I learned from an art teacher I had about a year ago. She was the one who taught us to really work on a painting by working the layers over and over again because it is the only way to make some really interesting colors and effects. So to start off we plan to use paint on our clear strip and show some gradual changes in colors. Once we have an interesting back drop we are going to start scratching, chipping, and bleaching, using the method of subtraction. I love that we won’t be able to see it until after we finish everything. Hands on contact with film is so intimate! Happy Vday to us.