Cameraless

This was a project for college students to channel their inner gradeschooler. Messing around with paint, markers, tape and toys, who could ask for anything cooler? The cameraless edit was pretty fun and my partner Adam was very easy to work with. Thank God for good partners who either don't have ADHD, or have ways of controlling it that keep me on track! We had a lot of fun doing the project and I learned that film can be way cooler than digital.  

It was a bit of a challenge for me at first as I began to work on the film because I hadn't ever attempted to do anything like it. Manipulating the film strips was as interesting as it was foreign. I think my favorite area of manipulation was the magazine transfers. It was a method I'd never heard of and found it to be really effective. Given more time and a longer edit I would have used much more of this style to portray my message. It is amazing how my idea actually looked better than I thought it would have. I expected to see nothing but blobs of color and silly images (which actually happened) but it came across nicely as I portrayed earth and air.

I found that scratching seemed to give the best effect overall. It was more noticeable (on the film strip) than painting or bleaching but it was a little more time consuming. As far as the clear strip, I really liked adding shapes as they transformed into images that I didn't expect to see with a surprising result.  

This was a really fun project.

 

synesthesia/cymatics

Ok so cymatics is very cool. The actual workings of such incredible beauty is nearly without equal other than nature itself. I was impressed by the variations of art forms cymatics can manipulate as we saw at the end of the TED presentation. Without ever knowing about cymatics it was great to see such beauty at work. I had to share this video by Nigel Stanford with you, but something tells me that you may have already seen it: http://nigelstanford.com/Cymatics/  I was so intreigued that I had to look into it more and was blown away with what cymatics can do. The ability to manipulate objects through sound wasn't totally foreign to me of course but the heights and various ways it was allowed to change was nothing short of amazing.

Not as mind blowing, but equally as fascinating is synesthesia. After reading more about it, it makes sense to me that it could actually be more accurately referred to as ideasthesia. Perhaps the person is formulating an idea of what something looks or smells like which triggers the mind to relay that to the senses. I am always impressed by what the mind can do, but as impressed by what we as artists can do to manipulate the viewer's mind into seeing what we want them to see, feel, taste etc. It's our job to open them up to what many people seek -- escape. People go to movies, look at art, or listen to music to escape the "real world" for a little while and it's our job to make that escape one they can remember and think about, talk about, and hope to relive in their lives. These types of influences, synesthesia/cymatics, are new tools that I can use to help change the way I work.

1st class

Impressions of first video - 1st class

The film I just washed was heavily edited and showed a lot of layers I don't know exactly what I took away from it other than seeing some techniques being used that I am unfamiliar with the shapes stood out to me above all other images as similar shakes morphed into each other and movement was a constant fight against stillness the images of people and the airplane didn't seem to fit which I really liked because it allowed me to be distracted from the constant image bombardment of numerous layers of the edit. It looked like scratching was done to the film to give it a really radical appearance, the music was very cool and worked well within the rambunctiousness of the video. I don't recall feeling like there was an obvious story to tell in the film but if I saw it again I might be able to make something up. This seemed to be more of a mash up of cutting and screwing around with the edit but it looks pretty neat