cameraless filmmaking thus far...

So far, I found cameraless filmmaking an awesome experience that has allowed met to be creative in ways that normal filmmaking may not allow. When starting out, my initial reactions were that it felt and looked a lot like experimental films, however, I like creating these films more than I do experimental films. I enjoy how the films have the capabilities to showcase different techniques that cannot be used and bring new meaning to simple things such as collages. A lot more factors need to be taken into consideration when making these films so one is more aware of the nature of the films. For example, it is very easy to slow things down on film in order to show them for however long the filmmaker feels like showing something on the screen. However, with cameraless filmmaking, the duration of an image is a direct result of how much the filmmaker may have of whatever resource to keep the image the same of the screen, or repeating the same image on the frame. So for me, animating anything on a strip of film becomes an arduous task that can become a tedious one as I try to duplicate each image and change the image slightly. Combined with my severe lack of artistic skills when it comes to drawing anything more complicated than a stick figure, I enjoy doing things like magazines transfer more, even though taking a thumb tack to film and scratching it to no end is highly enjoyable, if only to do an activity which others would deem crazy and mildly psychopathic. Fair enough. Speaking of magazine transfers, the awesome fact that it felt more like I was in an elementary school art class (in regards to hacking up paper and letting us put whatever we want on our strips of tape) makes this practice of cameraless filmmaking one of my favorites. I was familiar with taking newspaper and transferring the ink onto nail polish, but it had not occurred to me that something similar could be done with film. Though my focus in film as a whole will be directed towards documentaries, I will definitely continue to work with cameraless filmmaking recreationally.

Cymatics and Synesthesia response

While watching the video on cymatics, I was reminded of the short experimental film we watched last week in class where the images changed according to the tempo and beats of the music. While cymatics seems to be related more to the shapes created from the sound waves and vibrations emitted from sound, I feel that one could combine the two in order to create a new experimental film that makes sound visible. While it may be too small to accurately record the full shapes created by sound waves, one could use the clear film and place small amounts of ink on it and let the vibrations create the visuals. Similarly, one could try to draw on film that is places on top of a surface that vibrates from the sound waves. I’ll let someone else figure out the device to be made in order to get vibrations strong enough to affect one’s drawing on film. To make sound even more “visible,” the use of synesthesia in art could be applied by having the colors “correspond” with the sound heard. However, it will obviously be highly subjective as it would be whatever color I deem to be appropriate for whatever song I’m listening to. Also, I don’t have synesthesia, so it wouldn’t be based on whatever synesthetic experience I would have had. It would most likely be like word association, only with color. I suppose that if it felt like a sad song, I would choose something like blue or brown, and conversely, if it were a happy sounding song it might be pink or yellow. I could jazz it up and make the colors opposite of the feeling one would associate with them, so yellow for sad, etc. Which is fitting, as I don’t find yellow particularly happy, this goes for the Coldplay song as well. Or I could match rhyming scheme with a color whose name rhymes with it such as red and said, though that may not follow closely to whatever rules apply for synesthesia’s use in art.