Short film made in a couple of hours yesterday.
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Sandnes Residency
July 6, 2009 – 8:37 am
Above - still from 3 Noodle Minutes a short film which came about due to having to eat cheap food as, by an irritating set of coincidences, I’ve arrived in the third richest country in the world with only about 50 of my worthless pounds… I thought I’d left Mr Noodle in Nottingham. Video soon - when I can get vimeo to stop playing up.
I’ve just started a 6 week residency in Sandnes, Norway. I’ll be posting bits of work and notes while I’m here (actually I started posting yesterday). I have a lot of thinking to do as well as enjoying the long days here. The studio, Stasjon-K is an old fire station and is next to a larger complex KinoKino containing three cinema screens and a gallery space that is opening in September. (Which looks very exciting…)
Not entirely sure what project(s) I’m working on while I’m here - I have a few ideas half developed but feel like its a bit pointless to just plough into them without taking in my surroundings here first. Trying to balance the panic of knowing I’ve got a couple of shows coming up and relaxing into the place will get easier when I’ve got some beer money… I’m off to the smallest mountain I can find tomorrow, building up to the terrifying but ‘tourist friendly’ Pulpit Rock. I’m still thinking about these natural patterns mentioned in the two previous posts - but I want to go out and find sources and starting points from nature rather than allow myself to just descend (should that be ascend?) into the wholly imaginary.
In the absence of any well written prose, here’s a short list of things I’ve written in my sketchbook, without their accompanying illustrations or explanations.
- video-soup
- guts of an old cinema
- cake stands
- film mechanisms
- cyclones
- eye-floaters
- winding desk/edit table
- runes
- tatoo convention
- tony conrad
- wooden cabins
- A1 paper - boo!
- rolls - yeah!
- newsprint
- hydrocarbons
- guitar picks and table tennis balls are made of celluloid
Semi-Procedural Drawing Films - Tests
June 14, 2009 – 8:41 pm
I’ve been making drawings that I call semi-procedural for a while now. “Procedural” meaning there is a fixed rule about how they are made and “semi” to mean that these rules aren’t so fixed - so they’re never written down. The rules only exist as a set of parameters in my head with a vague idea of what the limits are to each parameter.
I’ve been struggling with methods of animating for a while, the idea of copying frames then adjusting them makes me so bored I quickly lose interest. So these animations are made by drawing a field of marks and taking frames as samples of the larger image. Similar to the way the previous post cut apart the origami paper into a grid of frames but in a much looser way, using a small camera making judgements on the fly (in a similar manner to the drawing).
Origami Seizure Comparison
May 28, 2009 – 9:30 am
I still haven’t figured out anything serious to do with this footage…
The original, brutal, 35 minute Paul Sharits film is on UBU web.
Paper Synth Tests
April 9, 2009 – 12:16 am
Audio-less proof of concept for a new video performance. Made by spinning pieces of origami paper in front of a camera. A second layer is superimposed digitally, the intention for the performance is to mix them live (using a ropey home-built mixer).
My plan is to make a portable setup for live performances - sick of having to ask venues for a giant list of TVs, turntables etc. The idea is to build three units that spin geometry in front of miniature cameras with all the controls - video gain, motor speed and little LED torches all built in.
drawIslands() - Performance, Titanik 18/12/08
January 8, 2009 – 4:12 pm
Some images from the performance at Titanik gallery, Turku.
Scrollers
November 14, 2008 – 11:18 pm
Thursday 14th Nov - Sumu Studio tests
More receipt islands, some footage of the setup - still trying to perfect the mechanism. Made from pens, bits of wire, lots of sticky tape and a £15 mini camera.
Some footage of the altered setup with LED lighting, the projector and the premier of the small roll of receipt paper labelled ‘C’.
Receipt Islands
November 12, 2008 – 9:48 pm
More islands… this time drawn on receipt paper and rolled past the camera. The video above has been cropped and heavily processed to get the 2 tone effect. I also added some music by Goodiepal, mostly because I happened to remember it whilst recording the video, it was a free download (so I don’t think I’m breaching any copyright) and I like the imagery audiery.
It’s all looking a bit ropeyer than I wanted at the moment, I plan to go back to it and attempt different camera positions, lighting and of course better island drawings.
Utö and the Archipelago
November 11, 2008 – 10:04 pm
Imaginary Archipelago
The islands from old sketchbooks re-emerged on arrival to Turku after looking at all the maps of the Archipelago, it seemed like these drawings had been lying dormant waiting for me to come here. They now actually seem to make some sense, where as before they were almost an exercise in composition, randomness and mark making. I won’t go into this too much here as I think it’s worth an essay or two, instead I drew a diagram to explain all the connections that seem to have come together.
Diagram to explain current thought processes 11/11/08.
In the first week I have barely been in Turku as we decided to take a trip out to the Archipelago, taking a ferry all the way to Utö on the edge of the Baltic and the Archipelago sea. The trip has not only given me a lot of video to edit (a short film of the ferry journey is already half finished) but a hell of a lot to think about… see diagram, above. Below is a quick edit of some of the footage from the actual island just to give an impression of the place.
Exploring Utö on the edge of the Finnish Archipelago, November 2008.
Utö is a tiny island less than 2km across and a 5 hour ferry journey from Nauvo, which itself is an island an hour from Turku. It is remote but inhabited by around 30 people during the off season who are all supplied with wireless internet by the lighthouse. Utö used to be an important military outpost is now mostly a tourist destination, the numbers swell to around 300 during the summertime as many people own summer houses here in the islands.
This was filmed when the weather was bleak, I only had a couple of minutes of tape, the battery was dying and we needed to catch the ferry soon.