Telecine was a project for Sideshow, the fringe festival for the launch of the British Artshow in Nottingham 2010. The piece I made was part of a joint experiment with artists Georgie Park and Ruth Scott under the name The Heuristics Laboratory. The name was chosen as an expression of our will to try things out and learn new things. One of the definitions of ‘heuristics’ is that of trial error, this became more and more apt as the project went along. And so the title Telecine was perhaps the only constant for a project of shifting goals. So I’ll try and describe some of the stages along along the way as well as the experiment that was presented to the public.
The Proposal
The original proposal at the start of the project was to make a hand drawn film over the course of the exhibition and then present it to the public at the end of the month having never seen it or worked in this manner before. This was changed because our original budget was quartered and we were offered a space.
The Space
We were offered to use an incredible and huge space within Nottingham Trent University at this point I decided what I wanted to do was form a public laboratory, a place to make a series of extended experiments in converting film to video. An expanded laboratory – using physical objects, motion and gadgets and short lived installations and performances to make adhoc plays on the idea of what a film lab does. Then, when doing a last minute reccie, we realised the site for our site specific art had been turned into an office where lines of hundreds of students would hand in their coursework during our exhibition.
New Space
So we found a new home in the Malt Cross Gallery, a far smaller and less public gallery in the back of a pub. This new space didn’t really lend itself to the open laboratory I had wanted as the audience’s experience would have been more like walking into a private studio. So I designed a project where this would become more of a hub for some other activity. I bought a reel of film (20 minutes of an episode of Buck Rogers) from ebay and set about taking digital photos of each frame in and around Nottingham, using disparate light sources to illuminate a second at a time. Essentially turning the city into my telecine laboratory, making notes on the sounds present at each location and presenting them along with daily rushes of the converted film. Then my laptop died.
Going Analogue
With about four days to go I had to figure out a new way to work that relied only on analogue technology. What I came up with was a simple process that admittedly sounds convoluted. I drew a sine wave on a long strip of 35mm film, cut it up and used a time lapse CCTV video recorder to gradually speed up footage of a slide projector to the speed it would play back as if they were frames of a regular film, 24 frames per second. To do this I had to carefully coordinate the switching on and recording of two video players sequence the projector.
I recorded for 12 hours per day so that I could fill a 3 hour tape in the time-lapse VCR with the image of the slide projector. Then on each consecutive day I would playback the previous day’s video on a video projector pointed at the same screen, timed so that the middle would align with the centre point of the recording. The plan was that over the course of the week I would gradually get a video that would have layers of all the previous days playing over the top of one another. By the Saturday this should then mean there would be a 5second apex where the film was playing back at ‘full speed’ which was the recording of 12 hours of Monday recursively sped up.
This worked in theory, but on Wednesday one of the tapes was chewed in the video playback machine and the projector only projected a combination of static, a ‘no signal’ screen and the Del logo. Ruining not just that day’s recording but all the days previously recorded. So instead of the graceful plan of it all syncing up by the last day and reaching one beautiful moment on Saturday I decided to run the experiment as many times as I possibly could, in an attempt to make Thursday’s footage reach the 24fps target. This isn’t to mention the number of projector bulb blow outs that I had that all seemed to happen the moment I stepped out of the gallery.
Some video to follow. See also, Static the hand drawn documentation of the 6 day experiment used for our lab notes publication.