Monday, February 22, 2010

Scratch Film Junkies - Round 2

I have to give mad props to The Scratch Film Junkies. When I first watched their “To the Beat” I thought it looked pretty cool, but I didn’t think it would be too hard to master. I figured the biggest challenge, if any, would be animating certain shapes or images. Throughout the last couple of weeks of cameraless filmmaking I have learned a lot of different techniques that I didn’t even know were possible.
After watching “St. Louise“, I have a new appreciation for the Scratch Film Junkies. I can only imagine all the time and energy that went into their films and definitely into the pre-production. At first I thought it was a bunch of scribbles and scratches, but I now can see that there is always a method and “picture” behind what they are creating. I found it immensely hard to create an animation and when I did it wasn’t as detailed as I would like it and once it went through the projector, my 100 frames would be done in a blink of an eye. How depressing. Everything Olivia and I did had a certain planed theme to it, even though it might have not shown on screen. Every scratch and bleach stain was purposely placed.
This time around while watching the masterful work of the Scratch Film Junkies I was able to pick out the techniques that they used that I would have not noticed or even known before. Just like the previous one we watched in class, I loved how the Scratch Film Junkies would scratch everything but the face of a person on found footage. I thought that was interesting and it definitely drew your attention to that face. One of my favorite parts of this film was when the black arrow was turning and then all of a sudden it would change into another object or turn into another color. I also loved, like before, the like colors from the same color family that were either inked or painted on with harsh black lines or scratches over it. For some reason that appealed to me and I wanted to see more. I did notice this time around that they used several techniques within each frame. I think we limited ourselves, keeping it safe, but every so many frames we would do one technique and move onto the next. I wish now that we mixed a couple more together to see how it would have turned out. I am still impressed that their soundtrack works so well with their images. That still baffles me because I’m sure when it comes to our group adding a soundtrack, we are going to struggle trying to keep a beat that corresponds visually.
Today, I was excited to see how mine and Olivia’s “Element” Project would turn out. While it was running through the projector we hit a snag in that we had our single sprocket film on the wrong side so it couldn’t go through the projector properly. It set us back because I had re-slice and re-tape a majority of our reel. But hey, you live you learn. It’s all about your failures and learning through them. The most visual appealing part of our reel would have to be the rayograms. It looked AWESOME! I really liked that we toned them too, giving the film more life.

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