Developing

The developing that we did last class was almost identical to the process that we used in high school. It brought back a lot of memories...mostly bad. I was looking forward to seeing our project but we ran out of time since we were so busy multitasking. I liked all of the other groups projects that we saw. It was neat to see some of the techniques that they used. I wish we would have tried some of them but I guess you can't think of everything. I saw some of the same techniques that we used so we know that it will look pretty good. Skip's group use the same ink that we did and is showed well on film, so that is one less thing that we have to worry about.

The caffenol was an interesting experiment. Its good to know that I can make a developer out of household products. I don't drink coffee so at least there is some use for it. It didn't work as well as the chemicals but at least there was an image on the film. Its too bad you had such a hard time finding that washing powder.

I am looking forward to the project tht we are doing on Thursday. I am not sure what kind of story that we will be able to come up with using beans, rice, and salt but I guess we can edit something together. I suppose we will be running the film through the projector and recording it on dv so that we can edit it later. Maybe it will be a snowstorm. Not much else going on in my little world.

Last Week

Last Thursday's animation went really well. I hope that everything turns out well with the film. We came into it with a general idea of what we wanted but really had no idea how we were going to do it. We didn't really play around too much with the different planes, we just stayed on the top. Once we got rolling everything went by really fast. I estimate that we probably shot about a minute of footage just making the story up as we went along. Gigi came up with a great idea for the car crash and we mutilated a couple of cars along the way. A lot of our time was spent fighting with the playdough trying to get it to stand up straight. We finally just taped the thumbtack in the little hole since we kept losing it on the floor. Our floam started melting under the lights and gave us a fun time as well. Once we edit it together it should be pretty cool. We went to another set up for a close up but I'm not sure how it will turn out. I think we might have tried to get too close...we'll see. Now we just have to come up with a soundtrack to go along with it.

In other news, Kristen and I finally finished the elements project. We saved the fun stuff until last...not really. We bleached a pattern into a few seconds of one of our spools and we finished up another with some inking. Tomorrow we are going to try to splice all of this together and get it on the spool. I just really hope that Our magazine transfer strips don't come off in the projector. A couple of them are getting loose from all of the winding and unwinding. Last time we projected something the projector ate it so hopefully we will ave better luck this time. We have to see our masterpiece at least once. I also hope that our animations look pretty cool. We did four different ones so we have options if one of them sucks.

I am looking forward to next week as well when we develop the film. I developed film in a still photography course back in high school so I am looking forward to seeing if the process is similar to that. If I remember correctly the chemicals don't smell very pleasant, but then again they are chemicals. I suppose that is the week where we will turn the classroom into a darkroom. Sorry I hadn't blogged in a while, last week was Nuts with a capital "N".

Continued work on the Project

Kristen and I worked for the past few days on the project and have made some pretty good progress. We finally got our animations done and traced them onto the film. We used inks and sharpies to get some color on there. I just hope that the colors that we used are visible once it is projected. I am really excited to see how the magazine transfers turn out on screen. The creativity level has gone up as we have progressed through the project. We aren't getting stuck on what to do next as much anymore. The scratching has turned out to be my favorite method, probably due to the least amount of clean up required. And it also looks cool on film. We are completely done with two of the rolls and are about 2/3 of the way through the last two. It's a good thing we still have a while to finish this project because most of this week will be devoted to the animation project.

Work on the Project

I never have been and probably never will be a good illustrator. My drawing skills topped out in the first grade. So that does not bode well for this animation assignment. I am drawing a simple flower and lets just say I'm glad it will only be on screen for two seconds. It may just end up looking like a blob of crap, but that can be art too. I wish that the frames were a little larger to draw the image, but it is what it is.

Kristen and I gave bleaching the black leader a shot and made a complete mess. We probably bleached about two feet of it so that we can apply ink and our animation to the roll. I think we will scratch most of the black leader to avoid the mess of bleaching.

The never ending search for ink finally ended at Staples. AC Moore only had black ink, Michaels had a nice six color pack but wanted thirty dollars, and Target and Wal-Mart are worthless. So I ended up getting some waterbased stamp pad refill ink. I hope it works as well as the ink we used in class, but if not I'll fight for the ink in Bear with everyone else.

Second Class

The second week of class went really well. The magazine transfers went a lot better than I thought it would. I was a little skeptical that the ink would stay on the tape once the paper was rubbed away but it worked out really well. I cut the strips a little too wide to fit so they needed to be trimmed. I guess it is better to make mistakes when practicing rather than screwing up a project. I'll just have to cut them thinner and probably soak them longer than I did in class.

The inking was interesting. I tried the oil both ways; putting the oil down and inking over it and inking and putting oil over it. When I inked first and then put the oil on it just seemed to smear the ink anound and did not give the bubbly effect of inking over the oil. I think I prefer laying down the oil and painting the ink on top of that. That will work well with the clear leader but I guess I would have to bleach the emulsion off of the black leader in order for the ink to show up.

A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book

The beginning of the article was a good review of what we have learned in previous film classes and in this class. He got into a lot of technical aspects that were a little confising, but overall I think I got most of it. He got into a lot of still photography terms and tricks that took me back to my high school classes. I found it kind of funny that he doesn't like to use light meters. It was interesting to learn of all of the techniques you can use on different types of film. I didn't realize that there would be that much of a difference between tungsten and daylight film.