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EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA
When presented with such a broad range of options as the Experimental Media module contained, I became very over whelmed with the very large scope of the areas it was possible to work within. Narrowing this down to a hand full of techniques that I wanted to work with was challenging and required a lot of thought. I was, however, fortunate enough to have a very good idea of the narrative and content I wanted to create if the way that would be presented had not been immediately apparent. Such is the nature of experimental media.
PRE-PRODUCTION I have had an idea gestating in my head for several years about a deep-sea diver sinking to his death deep below the waves. I had always considered this to be an image that could carry a deeper metaphor for sinking into the depths of the human psyche and ultimately coming to accept the fate that lies immediately ahead for him. Having chosen the central idea for my experimental media film, I then set about trying to find an appropriate technique to make the film a reality. Although I had originally conceived this idea as a live action short film I knew almost immediately that filming with an actor in a large body of water would not be an option as this would be a logistical nightmare that would carry serious health and safety concerns as well as being far beyond the capabilities of my limited experiences with film making at this point in time. The time I had available to produce this project in would also be limited and filming underwater is something that requires very thourough preparation and specialist filming equipment such as costumes that double as life support for the actor and crew. Knowing that I would not have the time or resources to take a literal approach to creating this film I then set about looking for a more abstract way to approach creating the film. After attending a camera less film and expanded cinema workshop at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, where members of my class created a film by scratching and drawing directly on to 16 mm film, I decided that a scratch film would be a good way to present this idea as the sense of motion that is achieved by scratching lines and grooves into film stock would lend itself very nicely to creating a sinking feeling. These sections of the film form the backbone that the central idea is pinned to and rank among the most successful parts of the finished film. With the core ideas I would be working with fixed in place, I then started to gather the materials that would be needed to create a scratch film. The first thing I would need would be 16 mm film stock. This proved to be hard to find for a reasonable price as film stock is no longer manufactured due to the rise of cameras that shoot on video and more recently digital formats. This is the main drawback to working with an analogue medium of film that is becoming ever increasingly antiquated. After spending several days searching the internet and seeing if I could acquire film from a few contacts that had been given to me, I decided the cheapest option would be to purchase 200 feet (roughly five and a half minutes) of black leader from a seller on E Bay. This took several weeks to arrive as this seller happened to be located in America. I should have taken this eventuality into account sooner and started searching for film stock earlier on in the process as I ended up losing two weeks of time that could have been spent working on and refining the film. Thankfully I had the items I needed to scratch and colour the film to hand already. These included a craft knife and several surgical scalpel blades that I have used in the past to build model kits with and a pack of Sharpies permanent marker pens. Overall, aside from the slight problems acquiring film stock, I am very happy with the way the pre-production phase went. On many a level this phase progressed very smoothly if perhaps a bit slowly to begin with. The ideas came very naturally to me and from that point onwards there seemed to be only one logical way to connect and actualize them within the context they needed to be presented in. PRODUCTION Once the film had arrived I was ready to start creating Void Dive. Working on the desk in my bedroom I measured out several one meter strips of film, five seconds in length each. I would have liked to have worked with longer strips but due to the confined space I had to work in this was not possible without becoming unwieldy to handle and store the finished strips to be edited. As I was working with black leader the main bulk of the images are scratched into the emulsion of the film and then coloured on the opposite side with permanent markers. It felt very good to have a craft knife back in my hands as I spent a day reacquainting myself with the weight of it by making some test scratches on short one second strips of film to gauge how much pressure I needed to apply to remove the emulsion. I also quickly discovered at this stage that handling the leader left sticky finger prints that bits of emulsion, dust and other particles would attach to and sometimes made it hard to scratch the film with accuracy. From this point on I started to wear disposable vinyl gloves throughout the production process to cut down on this. For the two sections that feature the diver sinking ever deeper I scratched most of the black emulsion away from the leader. This became very time consuming and left behind a lot of particles that attached to this strip of film. On the plus side, it also left a lot of texture on the film that when combined with an uneven coat of colour due to the attached particles lends a hazy look to these sequences that makes it look like there is a barrier of water between us and the diver. These kinds of happy accidents happened a few times when working with this technique and have left me with plenty of ideas to try out on future scratch film projects. To provide light while I made the scratches and coloured the film, I used a bed side lamp with a bendable neck. If there is one bit of kit that I didn’t have while creating Void Dive that would have made the experience easier it would be a light box so I could move the film as I scratch and not go against the grain of the emulsion and move out of the lamps narrow focus of light. During some of the sections in the finished film, mostly when going frame by frame, I think I scratched the images a bit too large for the borders of the frame. As a result, the images are slightly off center and appear to be cut off at the edges. This is most noticeable during the three sections with images of fish as the tail fins are cut off on the left side of the frame but is also noticeable during the two sequences that feature three-pronged trident like images. To create the two air bubble sequences, I used a safety pin to punch tiny holes into the film frame by frame. This is the section of the film that took up the most of my time but I think the finished result is more than worth it. Having a magnifying glass would have allowed me to cut down on the amount of green and yellow marks on the film where I accidently nicked the top layer of the emulsion with the pin but unfortunately, I didn’t have access to one that didn’t have a very scratched lens that made it unusable for precision work. I really like the section with the flashing, coloured orbs. They look very much like the wide open, startled eyes of the diver. I created this section and the section with the thick wavy blue lines by applying small drops of Domestos bleach to the film. This melted away the various colour layers of the emulsion and left the smooth, clear backing of the film underneath that could be coloured on the opposite side. This is something else I would defiantly like to experiment with further in future scratch films. The three sections with the fish I am mostly disappointed with. I didn’t have much time left to scratch them out as precisely as I would have liked and I think they jump about a bit too noticeably in the frame as well as the above stated issue with scratching them too big. They look kind of goofy and not at all like the haunted, savage deep sea life that I tried to model them after. I should have spent more time planning their appearance before I placed scalpel to film to better define their relation to the diver. I’m happy with the way the colour scheme conveys sinking further away from the surface moving from aqua, light blue, deep blue and finally purple to represent the bottomless void of the deep sea. The bright colours against the black background are very representative of the bioluminescent lights that many deep-sea fish rely on to survive in the dark depths of the ocean. Working with clear film would have been to easier to colour but I felt that a black background was essential to portraying the void of the diver’s psyche and the deep-sea environment. POST-PRODUCTION: SPLICING FILM One of the things that attracted me towards creating a scratch film had been the opportunities it afforded me to work with analogue methods of film making, opportunities I probably would not have had otherwise due to the antiqued nature of working with analogue film. One of the process’s I was most looking forward to trying my hand at was editing Void Dive with an old-school film splicer that I had brought from E Bay. The Federal model of splicer I purchased is designed to be used with film cement that sticks the strips together. I couldn’t purchase any cement that would arrive in time for me to meet the deadline for the experimental media critique so I opted to buy a reel of super clear splicing tape instead. After watching a few videos of splicing techniques on YouTube I quickly figured out that it would be possible to adapt the techniques they showed for using film cement to using film tape instead with relative ease. The main disadvantage I found with splicing film together using tape is that there is a slight gap in the seams where the two bits of film meet. This gap could be less than a millimeter wide but will still show up on the finished film as a big, bright line that will stretch across the entirety of the frame and be very jarring in a way I had not intended it to be, even if it is only visible for a frame or two. To compensate for the above problem, I coloured the tape over the gaps with a black permentant marker. When feed through the projector this made the gaps appear to be a deep red colour, even with two coats of the permanent marker. This isn’t ideal but is stands out less than a large, bright white line. I should have considered film splicing techniques earlier in the process when I would have had the time to buy some film cement that would leave no gap at all between the two strips. Having said which, there still could have been an issue with stripping too much of the emulsion away at the seams to cement the two strips together which would also have exposed the projector light under the film. Another problem that ended up being more time consuming than anything else was that I had to cut out each individual sprocket hole that I had placed the tape over, three over the width of two frames, for each of the twenty-two splices in total that I made. I’m very good at handling a crafting knife but I still managed to cut myself on the knuckles while doing this, not a pleasant experience at all. Aside from the above mishap, I found splicing film together to be very relaxing and soothing. I’ve always been a great proponent of the satisfaction and joy of creating something with my bare hands and a process such as this sums up exactly why it has always appealed to me. POST-PRODUCTION: TELECINE In order to have a digital version of Void Dive that I could import into Final Cut Pro to add sound to and present at the critique, I would have to play Void Dive on a projector and record the projection with a digital camera. This process of transferring analogue film to a digital medium is known as a telecine. I booked out one of the photography darkrooms for a day and projected Void Dive onto the door with an Ampro Stylist 16 mm projector that I had brought from E Bay. I recorded the projection with a Canon C100 camera and a 24-105mm lens. It ended up taking a good four to five hours of playing Void Dive back, refining the settings on the Ampro Stylist and the C100 to finally arrive at a recording I was satisfied with. The main problem I encountered during this process was finding the right balance of focus on the projectors lens and the camera lens. As Void Dive is just over one minute long and most of the individual sections that make up the film only a matter of seconds, it was next to impossible to record the entirety of the film in sharp focus as I had very little time to change the focus on the camera or projector. Because of this most the telecine is slightly out of focus. This is not unbefitting for a film that is set underwater where human eyes are incapable of focusing sharply nor is it something that I had originally intended. I would put this down to being a slight but still happy accident. POST-PRODUCTION: DIGITAL EDITING After I had a telecine of Void Dive that I was happy with, I then imported the footage into Final Cut Pro. I had already decided that I wanted to keep the footage as true to the original 16 mm film as possible so the only changes I made was to reverse the footage so it played in the order I had originally intended. I then cut out the one or two frames that showed the bright white line over the course of six splices that I found very distracting. POST-PRODUCTION: SOUND For the sound, I wanted to create the appropriate ambience of being in a void of water and mind. I had originally considered purchasing a hydrophone, a microphone that is designed to record underwater, so I could record my own sound. Unfortunately, hydrophones are very expensive due to the specialist conditions they are designed to be used in so I had to fall back on field recordings made by other people. I layered and mixed three individual field recordings I found on Freesound.org, the first a distant bass rumble to add an ominous sense of the impending void the diver is forever passing through. The second field recording conveyed the gentle swishing of the water around the diver and the distant motion of the waves above him, the detached sense of calm and peace that the diver is constantly moving away from. The third recording is the sound of the divers respirator that features dripping water and the movement of the divers body. This recording I imported into WavePad and stereo panned from the left speaker to the right speaker over the course of the film to further add to the sense of sinking before layering it with the other sounds in Final Cut Pro. I would have liked to have added a few more sounds into the mix but having tried this, I found them a bit overwhelming for a film that runs for one minute in length. SUMMARY I very much enjoyed working with this technique and the raw, hands on approach to film making it afforded me. I have learnt a multitude of new skills related to working with film stock and film projectors that I would like to develop further. I already have plans to use scratch film techniques for a series of poetry videos I will be creating for a friend of mine and am looking forward to working with 16 mm film again soon in the future. THE FINISHED FILM CAN BE VIEWED AT: https://youtu.be/N-z3CRNL6JY Comments are closed.
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AuthorMy name is Clay Sandford and I am currently studying an FDA in Film and Media Production at University Centre Weston. I have a keen interest in directing, cinematography and camera operating. Archives
April 2017
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