Scratch Film Junkies, 2

Watching the second film scratch junkies movie was a little different from my initial experience. I knew that this sort of work takes time, but I didn't realize how much effort goes into creating something that lasts for such a short period of time. I created 30 seconds of film and it took me hours and hours of time to do so. Because of this i felt that I could appreciate St. Lewis more than the fist film we watched by this group. Their techniques in film manipulation are very well developed. I only hope I'll be able to get that good over time. The first thing I noticed while watching the short film was a sort of panning effects. It looked like the camera was panning over a single frame. I'm intrigued by how this was done. Was this look created by very careful frame by frame animation, or another technique that I'm not familiar with? Another similar type of effect i noticed was when the images on screen were moving in and out of frame. That i imagine, had to be done by animating each frame, and now that i've had the experience of doing this myself, I can understand exactly how much work was done to create this. I also saw a few examples of multilayered manipulation, where several film strips were placed on top of each other, or at least thats my guess on how it was done. It looked like they took stock black and white footage, and then layered bleached exposed film stock on top of it. I would like to try this at some point, I guess all one would have to do is make the two separate strips and layer them, maybe adding some lite adhesive to make them stay together. As with the first film i saw by this group, I was fascinated with the way they managed to sync their images to music. Towards the end, the music and intensity of the images increased together. I really want to learn how to do this, its probably just simple math, especially if you could edit the sound track into the film with non linear editing technology, as opposed to creating it directly on the film strip (which i have no clue how to do). In retrospect I think the biggest problem I had with the film manipulation project was comprehending just how quickly the film would play. I took too much time painting/ scratching each frame with as much variety as possible and didn’t think of the larger picture as much as I will the next time I make something like this. There were a few animations, for example, that I wish I would have continued for a longer time then I did in the project. They were really pretty but lasted only ten frames at the most, I feel they would have had a greater effect if they were longer. I also wished I had tried to layer my work a little more. I did end up painting the exposed film we did in class, and it turned out very well. I think it would have been cool to go over some of the stuff I painted and scratch in some out lines. Also, I had made some rips in my magazine transfer stuff that I wanted to later outline with paint or a sharpie, but unfortunately forgot to do. Alas, this was not my only opportunity to make something like this, so I will probably refer back to these blogs the next time I’m working with 16mm.