A puddle of pedals

[Jero]

Different visuals/same audio:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvhUcDo0VX0[/youtube]

Where did you get the footage?
I was trying to add some visuals to a couple simple recordings I got this weekend, but didn't really like any of the filler I have recorded.

[Seance]

Different visuals/same audio:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvhUcDo0VX0[/youtube]

Where did you get the footage?
I was trying to add some visuals to a couple simple recordings I got this weekend, but didn't really like any of the filler I have recorded.

I made all the visuals myself. It's something I love to do. I love pairing visuals and music.

I have a prism hosed in a turned-wood eyepiece that I got as a present when I was 16.
I held that right over the lens of an iPad camera and then passed the camera over a quilt
that my wife was working on to get some of the images.

I also have a sort of "hourglass" timer that, instead of being filled with sand, is filled with a magenta
liquid that gloops a bit like honey. That was part of a suite of gifts my sister sent to me for my
21st birthday. The message being: "You're 21 now, your time is running out!" The rest of the gifts she sent to
me were black (a black kazoo, black graphite sketching pencils, a bag of black "condolences" balloons).
The joke being that there is nothing to look forward to after you turn 21.

Anyhow. The liquid hourglass has a translucent bottom so I centered that directly over the camera
because the resulting footage feels like the liquid is slowly pulsing over your eyeballs.

[moid]

If you like this sort of imagery you'd probably love some of the avant garde abstract films of Jordan Belson - I can't put the film visibly in this comment because it's not on youtube, but it's worth a watch

Jordan belson - Samadhi 1967




https://vk.com/video-59292187_169443314

[Seance]

If you like this sort of imagery you'd probably love some of the avant garde abstract films of Jordan Belson - I can't put the film visibly in this comment because it's not on youtube, but it's worth a watch

Jordan belson - Samadhi 1967

I've actually seen that projected on film a few times. Jordan Belson is good.

I'm a big fan of lots of avant-garde filmmakers: Len Lye, Hy Hirsh, Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith,
Jack Chambers, Christopher Maclaine, Bruce Conner, George Kuchar, Stan Brakhage.

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

I don't know a lot about avant-garde film, but I did a piece last year where I incorporated chunks of the soundtrack from Michael Snow's Region Centrale.

[Jero]

Different visuals/same audio:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvhUcDo0VX0[/youtube]

Where did you get the footage?
I was trying to add some visuals to a couple simple recordings I got this weekend, but didn't really like any of the filler I have recorded.

I made all the visuals myself. It's something I love to do. I love pairing visuals and music.

I have a prism hosed in a turned-wood eyepiece that I got as a present when I was 16.
I held that right over the lens of an iPad camera and then passed the camera over a quilt
that my wife was working on to get some of the images.

I also have a sort of "hourglass" timer that, instead of being filled with sand, is filled with a magenta
liquid that gloops a bit like honey. That was part of a suite of gifts my sister sent to me for my
21st birthday. The message being: "You're 21 now, your time is running out!" The rest of the gifts she sent to
me were black (a black kazoo, black graphite sketching pencils, a bag of black "condolences" balloons).
The joke being that there is nothing to look forward to after you turn 21.

Anyhow. The liquid hourglass has a translucent bottom so I centered that directly over the camera
because the resulting footage feels like the liquid is slowly pulsing over your eyeballs.

Very cool. Thanks for the details. I'll have to come up with something interesting to try one day. A friend of mine was showing me some amazing boutique kaleidoscopes recently, but I can't remember what they were called They would be fun to use.

[Seance]

I don't know a lot about avant-garde film, but I did a piece last year where I incorporated chunks of the soundtrack from Michael Snow's Region Centrale.

Sounds interesting. I guess incorporating the entire soundtrack into a new piece
would have made for a pretty long piece.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg5wrCIhXtQ[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2Kw-TWjXbw[/youtube]

Very cool. Thanks for the details. I'll have to come up with something interesting to try one day. A friend of mine was showing me some amazing boutique kaleidoscopes recently, but I can't remember what they were called They would be fun to use.

The small lenses on the cameras used for cellphones and tablets allow you to get right into certain
spots (kaleidoscope eyepieces, etc.) without having to use a specialty macro or wide angle lens like
you would have to when using a more traditionally sized DSLR camera body.

[Seance]

Speaking of avant-garde film... the Soundcloud clip I posted a while back is the soundtrack I made
for a hand-painted scratch animation I made on 35mm film (and then digitally transferred).

http://soundcloud.com/caesarshift/soundtrack-runthrough

Here is a still frame from the animation:


And here is a link to another thing I did by using similar techniques, but using some old
16mm footage that I shot in college.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjPigU3qmIU[/youtube]

[lumena]

wow.
Great stuff. Reminds me of things I saw in art school. Bits of Brakage and Len Lye. A lot of work on your part I am sure.
Makes me want to buy some black leader and get started. I do have a question though, how did you end up transferring it to digital? Did you use a lab or some sort of way at home. Really would love to see more of this.
The music was really nice at points it would really sync up with the image. Nice qualities overall in both, obviously you have had a bit of exposure to art stuff and it's really great you are pursuing it. Post more.
yeah!

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

I don't know a lot about avant-garde film, but I did a piece last year where I incorporated chunks of the soundtrack from Michael Snow's Region Centrale.

Sounds interesting. I guess incorporating the entire soundtrack into a new piece
would have made for a pretty long piece.

I sorta used the whole soundtrack — I recorded it onto 3 C-60's, and then mixed in sounds from two cassette players with my other noodling. (So, in theory, it would make the piece different every time.)

Sounds in case you're curious: https://mechanicalforestsound.bandcamp. ... ion-part-1

<pauses to see if the bandcamp embed tag is intuitive, gives up>

Side note: I saw Region Centrale on the big screen a couple years back, which was a very trippy/mind-melt-y experience.

[Seance]

wow.
Great stuff. Reminds me of things I saw in art school. Bits of Brakage and Len Lye. A lot of work on your part I am sure.
Makes me want to buy some black leader and get started. I do have a question though, how did you end up transferring it to digital? Did you use a lab or some sort of way at home. Really would love to see more of this.
The music was really nice at points it would really sync up with the image. Nice qualities overall in both, obviously you have had a bit of exposure to art stuff and it's really great you are pursuing it. Post more.
yeah!

Kodak stopped making black leader quite a few years ago. If you come across 16mm or 35mm black film leader,
then you should snatch it up. There are other solutions that approximate black leader, but they aren't the same
and some of them are a bit expensive (buying film that was developed without being exposed to light).
I just used a quantity of black leader that I already had, including stuff at the beginning and end of reels.

For the digital transfer I sent the footage to Frame Discreet in Toronto. They do great work. It isn't
exactly cheap, but it is cheaper than getting a physical 16mm print struck. So....
http://framediscreet.com/home/

Now that I actually have a non-point&shoot digital camera I might try to transfer some stuff on my own.
To avoid parallax and to get the brightest, highest resolution image I was thinking of projecting onto a
pane of frosted glass and then having the camera on the other side of that. I guess I'll have to experiment.

[Chankgeez]

<pauses to see if the bandcamp embed tag is intuitive, gives up>

Just the track #, like this:



Although, I have to enable Flash on my computer every time I wanna see something like that.

[Seance]

I don't know a lot about avant-garde film, but I did a piece last year where I incorporated chunks of the soundtrack from Michael Snow's Region Centrale.

Sounds interesting. I guess incorporating the entire soundtrack into a new piece
would have made for a pretty long piece.

I sorta used the whole soundtrack — I recorded it onto 3 C-60's, and then mixed in sounds from two cassette players with my other noodling. (So, in theory, it would make the piece different every time.)

Sounds in case you're curious: https://mechanicalforestsound.bandcamp. ... ion-part-1

<pauses to see if the bandcamp embed tag is intuitive, gives up>

Side note: I saw Region Centrale on the big screen a couple years back, which was a very trippy/mind-melt-y experience.

Thanks for providing the link. Interesting.

I've watched a few different "duration" films projected on film and it can be (depending on the film) incredible.
And of course the work of John Cage was a huge influence for a lot of avant-garde filmmakers. So duration plus
form is an appealing equation for lots of filmmakers just as it is for certain musicians.

You can step up to a painting or sculpture and spend as much or as little time with it as you desire. I guess
it says something about musicians and filmmakers/videomakers that they want to sculpt time and control even
that dimension of a viewer's experience. They want people to walk into a dark room and quiet their thoughts and
close their mouths and open their minds and soak it all in over a specified duration. Some people rebel against
such an imposition.

I really loved the Andy Warhol duration films such as Empire State and Sleep. Your mind has a chance
to wander and come back repeatedly to the concrete. Things are what they are, but there is variation, and sometimes
our minds follow or flow with that variation. But of course that technique can also be a crutch...

Several of the filmmakers who I went to film school with created opaque, obtusely obscure work that relied so heavily
upon theory so as to be intelligible only by a narrow group, almost to the point of being like an inside joke. But their
reaction and (often vociferous and verbally violent) response to any critique or criticism was that people who "don't get it"
just aren't smart enough. So "getting it" becomes like a secret handshake or sign of being "in the group".

Coming from the background of somebody who wrote and who studied literature, I tended to see film/art/music/writing as forms
of conversation or communication that are either more or less open to a group of people who speak and understand a
common language. There are a set of assumed associations, and then that is balanced with personal associations and
the unfolding of the series of aesthetic decisions nested within a piece.

Each aesthetic decision posits a position—some work is heavily reliant upon a series of invisible aesthetic decisions made by
artists and theorists of the past whereby even common words or notions/approaches must be "read" through the prism of
some arcane association in a book of theory or a specific film. So it is possible for a work to contain the key to read it,
but not entirely, since it is impossible to create anything intelligible that doesn't in some way rely upon previous knowledge
or associations, even if everyone's "understanding" of red or light or darkness are all subjective and contextual.

Of course these formalist, theory-based filmmakers also bristled whenever I talked about how most of what was done in the
avant-garde film world in the middle of the 20th century had already been done 30 to 75 years prior to that in literature.
Exploding time into the minutest of minutia is something that Marcel Proust did in the 1910s and '20s and Robert Musil did
in the 1930s and '40s and something that Raymond Roussel did in the 1890s and then more fully and astoundingly in La Vue from 1904.

And what experimental film follows as rigorous or as evocative of a "method" as Locus Solus or Impressions of Africa
by Raymond Roussel? And although Peter Kubelka considered his flicker film Arnulf Rainer from 1960 to be "the perfect
film" because it encompassed all possible combinations (light/dark and sound/silence and then worked through every possible
permutation of pattern combinations), in the end it tends to resemble a strobe light. Of course the static staccato blasts of
Arnulf Rainer do send spinning fractals of phosphene-like patterns dancing across your eyes and the rhythm of the
film starts to impact your breathing/heartbeat/thought patterns palpably.

In fact I was in a film class that a young sculptor was auditing as her very first film class. The professor screened Arnulf Rainer but
failed to warn the class ahead of time that flicker films sometimes cause certain people to go into epileptic seizures. So after
about 30 or 40 seconds into the film everyone in the class hears this thud and then some furtive rustling. Everyone turned
and saw the sculptor thrashing and flopping around on the floor. People were a bit stunned and perhaps thought that she was joking.
But no. I rushed to the lights and somebody else turned off the projector while a couple of other people helped the sculptor up
off of the floor. The sculptor had had an epileptic seizure and fallen out of her chair and onto the floor. She sat there, stunned,
for a few minutes and tried to regain her composure, but then she just stood up suddenly without a word and left the class and
never returned. Quite an introduction to film.

So the "language" or history of that type of film was not something that everybody had foreknowledge of. And although the
sculptor "felt" the film quite viscerally, perhaps she would not have done so if she had been warned ahead of time? I don't even
know if she was aware until that moment that she was prone to epilepsy.

[lumena]

Now that I actually have a non-point&shoot digital camera I might try to transfer some stuff on my own.
To avoid parallax and to get the brightest, highest resolution image I was thinking of projecting onto a
pane of frosted glass and then having the camera on the other side of that. I guess I'll have to experiment.

Sounds like a digital remake of an optical printer. I used one of those in art school, it's nice because you can zoom in on parts of a frame, adding another layer of motion.
yes, I found some on eBay.
I will give it a whirl, slowly as I will still need to remember how to do it.

[Seance]

Now that I actually have a non-point&shoot digital camera I might try to transfer some stuff on my own.
To avoid parallax and to get the brightest, highest resolution image I was thinking of projecting onto a
pane of frosted glass and then having the camera on the other side of that. I guess I'll have to experiment.

Sounds like a digital remake of an optical printer. I used one of those in art school, it's nice because you can zoom in on parts of a frame, adding another layer of motion.
yes, I found some on eBay.
I will give it a whirl, slowly as I will still need to remember how to do it.

Yeah, back about 15-18 years ago the JK people who made optical printers were also
making pretty expensive optical printers with a DSLR set up instead of a 16mm camera.
But the automation on those was DOS-based... and getting those types of effects are
easier to mimic on a computer these days.

But getting a digital transfer that captures most of the quirks and signature grain of
film is still worth it for me. I like the process of actually working on something tactile.
I can always edit the footage digitally after getting the transfer.