Over the weekend I began to create a little mock up of the hand cranked viewfinder, however I began to think creating a Zoetrope may be easier.
I later tested putting together some of the scans I had, joining the wavey ribbons of black or white, but again it just looked less like animation and more just filming across a big sheet of patterns.
We also explored cut-up and automatic writing. Using these methods I wanted to look at the text in my scans to see if any narratives could naturally form. I often used to do automatic writing when I was waiting to be dismissed from exams and I would just write down every thought that entered my head, so this was a very familiar activity.
We were then prompted to create a ‘wrong’ film, making it either lazy, ugly, boring and/or pretentious. However we were to avoid sarcasm. We also had to use text we generated from the automatic writing prompts so I went with “my feet don’t fucking work”.
My concept was that instead of animating frame by frame I would just film things being drawn on a paper. Just anything that came to mind while exploring this crude phrase. I also did not edit out any of the audio, but I did film it as low quality as possible to make it look ugly. I also liked how crude some of the things me and my friend were saying were and I think it added to to concept of the film. I think I was only semi-successful at avoiding sarcasm, but the task made me realize how much effort needs to be put in to intentionally make something ‘low-effort’.
On Wednesday I tried some stuff with smaller frames and put them in a make shift reel and I will try to zoetrope them.
At home I messed around with the scanner, using smaller cutouts like Chris suggested. I realized that changing the ambient light combined with he shadow of my arms could make very interesting possible frames on one scan. I need to talk to Chris to see if there is a scanner in a room that I can have full control of the lights.
Then I decided to try abandoning the paper scans as a whole and to see if moving shadows around would produce anything. This also produced some interesting textures, but I felt like having something to scan gave more variety.
With the scans I made, I tried some tests to see if they would animate, and it looked very interesting
As we approached the last week, I also realized building a zoetrope and creating a physical reel was simply too ambitious for the time I had on this project, so I went back to digital compositing, but still using analog sound recording.