Andre, NO WAY!!!

Pollocking in Motion

Tangibly painting on film sounds tedious, but so far it hasn’t been for me. I like the repetition, the fact that there is no pressure to make a perfect line because it all just lasts an instant. It’s the therapeutic kind of work. 6 x 1 so far has felt like art class. I like classes dedicated to a room of people sharing an activity. It is focusing, and more assuring then setting off alone into the treacherous waters of direct filmic expression. (Ta Da). I could definitely get together with everyone twice a week, once for instruction and practice and once for working on projects.
So far I have liked the magazing transfer the best. It’s like collage and I like how collage creates such a complicated image. It has so much more detail than drawing, and it’s much easier. One can focus on big picture issues rather than just details. All the art elements are there to be found instead of everything made from scratch. I like being able to work fast to create a richer result. Composition ends up being more important.
After spending so long on the celebrity eyes in class to only see them, barely, for a split second, I know not to work in such small detail, at least not unless I have a good way to do it. I’m going to try to print images on pieces of paper sized to the strip and then magazine transfer them.
I like the rayogram when combined with the other concepts. The faintness of the image, especially something with a lot of detail like sawdust or tinsel could make for a very cool background effect to highlight animation, or even more collage type work. If I had large contrast I could detail the two portions separately. There could be scratched spirals and squiggles in the black with paint in the clear.
I’m having trouble coming up with original conceptual ideas for the project. I seem to have the same idea as other people I talk to which is a four part piece with animated transitions, grass burning, fire being doused, waves forming with wind etc. Maybe mine will be different in how the elements interact and how they go together, a four colored wheel perhaps? Then the reddish orange section sets the other three on fire and then the water squirts out and forms a green layer on top through the green corner. I have a lot of ideas. I hope I plan it well enough and don’t regret any large portion. I’m curious to see how rough it is to work on this kind of thing for a very long time. I don’t know. I’m excited to find out. I may do that small printing thing and get some Captain Planet images. It would be pretty funny to end on heart anyway. Just a beaming heart that comes right at your brain. Just for maybe two or three seconds. I might not even tell my partner if I can get away with it.
The Stereolab video I posted is a good example of how I would use these skills/techniques. I am especially interested in music videos, but also in other applications of primarily individual work in non-narrative film. I could do opening/credits sequences for movies, commercials, film festival bumpers…

Sigur Ros

http://www.youtube.com/group/Gobbledigook

Song and vid. competition.

Brakhage

I hated how this thing started for the first... many pages. I had a lot of trouble reading the tech stuff. It didn't grab my attention, but once I got past it it was good. I was really expecting Brakhage to be a pretentious, high church avant-garde, heirarchist. He was actually a breath of fresh air from a lot of the other readings. He told how to do something he was obviously passionate about. He made it clear what was so appealing about his methods. He was inside the material rather than harping about the framework of movements, what deserves merit based on blah criteria etc. I liked his bit on Kenneth Anger's triptych as well. I like the assertion that it really was something else in the screening with only fifteen people. I was assuring to know, for Anger's sake at least, that his effort was rewarded with the voucher of a legendary figure at least, that if we cannot experience it, it is promised that it was good. It makes it more valuable in a way, the rarity. It's mythic.

I want to try some masking. He made it seem like there was no good way to do it perfect, but a stamp or sticker, or a vertical divide might work. I want to incorporate that into my film.

I liked the bit about closed eye visions being multicolored patterns and recall visions being scratched on. The closed eye creates its own random shapes and colors; the low signal from the retina causing the brain's receptor organ to shimmer and ripple. The memory is percieved as warped and warn, fragments of the original peeking through the fuzz, the feeling more preserved but still impressionistic. It's like these two are how you make art to begin with, your pure, intuitive imagination, the colors and light from inside, combined with your impression of the world no matter how much of its integrity is lost. No one has photographic clarity within, we don't have the megapixels, we don't have the ability do take things down with such detail. We can take a million separate things and combine them as a rough shape, faded and scratched, bleeding at the outlines, a distorted attempt at understanding a single theme, motive, individual, object, concept, place.

Self Portrait

On account of the distinguished recommendation of one Robert Barnett.