Week Four: Blackout, Pt. 2

Getting a second chance to work with the rayogram techniques again was really quite nice. Though we were given the options of working on the painting aspects of our films, both me and my partner, Will, decided to stay in the black box so that we could experiment more with the rayograms. This time, instead of just using random items that had been provided for us in class, we actually had some sort of a game plan. We wanted to use different items that could work for various elements of our project, not just focusing on one of the four elements in particular. So, Will got a Ziploc bag full of water to see how the light would reflect off of the water and hopefully produce a wavy effect that would be easily seen when projected onto a screen. We also used the short grain rice again, since we really liked how the light worked with the various overlapping pieces of rice. As we had planned, we also used more tape, tried a different piece of already developed film, and used more hay for an earthy appearance on film, all of which showed up after we developed the film, but some to a lesser extent than others.

Though Andre set up the Caffenol to be experimented with, the image on the film stock did not have as much time to develop, since it took much longer to develop than with the regular Kodak developer. A lot of the groups seemed to be more willing to really experiment with the rayogram process this time around. One group even exposed their film with a flame from a regular lighter instead of using a quick flicker from the overhead lights. Though some of the film strips turned out to be overdeveloped, I think the one my group did turned out pretty well, even if we ended up liking the rayogram from last week even more. We'll probably splice different portions of the two together.

During the lecture portion of class, we learned how to put our film on the reel, and Andre's toilet paper example will probably be stuck in my head for a while. It's hard to forget something like that, but it should definitely be put onto t-shirts, as he suggested. It doesn't sound like it is going to be too difficult to really do, once the process gets started, but it is starting the process that might be a little tricky, since each piece of film needs to be double spliced together before even being put on the reel. Hopefully, it won't turn out to be too arduous a task.

Lastly, the stop motion animation films that we watched from eatpes.com were really quite entertaining and mind blowing in a way. The intricate details and all of the different items that the filmmaker used to represent various pop culture references and whatnot were really well thought out and really creative. The Pac-Man one with the pizza as the game's namesake was probably my favorite, even though the one with the bomb dropping and destroying the city was a really creative and interesting use of popcorn, gift bows, matches, and old toy airplanes. There were just so many items incorporated into the films that I would not have thought to use. They made me really look forward to our super 8 animations that we will be doing next week as my group continues to discuss what items we will be bringing to create our scene.