Filmvideo

 

Here's the live update on my film!  It is taking quite awhile to complete, and my only defense is that I've been living!

I began the endeavor last Spring (as in 2004) which included Super 8 footage from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  I slowly gathered rolls of film as I visited the Garden several times last Summer.  My plan was to compose a film entirely of freeze frames.  I began to transfer the Super 8 to 16mm on the optical printer last Fall.  If you have never tried the optical printer, you really must run over to Millennium and sign up for a class right now.  This is my favorite part of filmmaking, but also the most time consuming and expensive aspect of the process (for me.)  Using the optical printer allows one to see the film frame by frame, picking up the tiniest, most fleeting gesture.  One frame of film equals .042 seconds.  So this is really ephemeral photography.  The optical printer is used for many techniques such as cropping, dissolves, slo-mo, fast-mo, reverse motion, collage, etc. etc., but my favorite trick is the freeze frame.

While working on the optical printer, I thought that it would be cool to incorporate the negative version of the prints into the film.  So I went back to Lablink (love those guys!) and had a clean 16mm print made, which I took over to A-1 (love those guys too), who made a test negative for me.  Everything looked great.  I continued on the optical printer, trying to work around certain obstacles that had cropped up, like a big black scratch line going through some of the Super 8 originals.  Grrr.  And I realized that since I wanted to get the negative cut, I would need to optically print the footage from A-1.  Then it was Christmas, and I put the project on hold.

During this time, I spent one afternoon creating a rough editing plan in order to see what kind of time measurement I should use for the freeze frames.  I decided that the cuts needed to be equal in length, and that one second seemed to work well.  The editing would be very simple, except I soon realized that editing a 3-5 minute film, composed of 24 frame segments, was going to drive me crazy.  This is about 180 splices at least of still images.  On an intellectual level I know that this is perfectly within reach.  I know that Tony Conrad cut in sections of one or two frames, when he made The Flicker.  And The Flicker  is one of my favorite things ever.  And that film is 30 minutes.

Draw your own associations, but I just feel in my heart that I'm meant to hustle Final Cut, and finish the whole thing on the computer.  I'll need to learn the program, but I think that my film is really meant to be a video.  Or maybe a filmvideo.

But first I'll need to do some more printing of the footage I gathered last month.  I was really surprised when a family pointed out an iguana camouflaged in the foliage around the lily pools.  You won't see it in the final film, but it's there!  xoxoxoxoxo