6x1: Enter The Squircle

So, 6x1 thus far. I’ve really enjoyed it. Who would of thought that painting on film would be so …therapeutic? I was reading some of the other blogs for ideas on how to make this last more than two sentences. Stephen’s got a good thing going on with the listing. So I’m gonna go with that…

Scratching: Alone, I don’t find scratching that eye-catching or intriguing . I think it works really well when supplemented with other techniques; such as painting. It was pretty surprising when we got that first strip, how fast those strategically placed lines whizzed by and looked like absolutely nothing. Definitely learned something about frame speed that day. I mean, I knew…but I didn’t know. Why does twenty-four frames per second have to be so literal man? It was also kind of neat to mess up the soundtrack and here that weird demonic groan. Extra creepy when the image is a baby in a crib and you load the film upside down…

Painting: Yeah, painting on film should be offered as an after school therapy. I’m not any good at it, but its good to me. The oil making the inks blot up is a nice effect. I got a little carried away with it today and managed to cake on about half an inch of ink and oil onto the film. I think at some point I was about five centimeters away from putting my nose in the stuff. I kind of slipped into some transcendental state and starting watching small ink blots pulling each other in to make one big ink blot. Trippy. Deciding it would never dry by the end of class, I wiped it clean. No good.

Animation: I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I kind of attempted it with the first scratching exercise, but if you’ve read above, you know it wasn’t a success. I can really see how intricate one can make these animations by the examples we‘ve seen in class. I want to get into, but I’m very skeptical of my own patience. The technique Andre showed us (finding mid points on the film strip to create a slow transition) makes a lot of sense and now I also believe in squircles. I’m really looking forward to trying the printing technique that was covered today. That looks like the animation I could get into. A.D.D. approved sir.

Magazine transfers: This I want to play around with some more. If coupled with some animation technique I think it would produce a really cool result. I was pretty surprised at how simple it was. Alas, like the scratching, I was pretty disappointed I didn’t create at least twenty-four frames with a theme or color scheme, so I could at least recognize what I had done once projected.

Rayograms: It was good to have that old familiar Dektol smell back in my life for an afternoon. I have a two year degree in photography and that smell alone brought back the memories. We got to do this on paper, but it produced a completely different quality on the film. Really neat stuff. I liked the textures shaped by the crystals a lot. The noodles looked pretty groovy as well. I look forward to playing around with rayograms.