Fields and Frames 5- 'Expanded/Perspectives'

During this lesson we looked at several different approaches we could take for the Fields and Frames project. One being stop-frame animation. Vicky set up a bottle on a table, started the recording and stopped after a few seconds. She did this several times then previewed the footage on Premiere. This was an interesting approach to stop-frame animation as i'm used to taking stills rather than video. The result was interesting as the water moved strangely across the screen because the water was moving at a different rate to the movement of the bottle.

Vicky then discussed 'Expanded/Perspectives' and gave us some examples of this:

'16mm loops- Scratch, Perforate, paint

Projectors share the same space as the audience

Audience encouraged participating in the making of a film

Body as a resource- mimic/build a tripod or a rig

Holding tools and technologies

Physical positions and viewing perspectives ‘upside down’'

We then looked at 'Reflexivity' and some example work that plays with the concept of Reflexivity, which is the concept of making the audience aware of what's going on behind the camera.

During this piece, you viewer can see the presence of the camera person, with someone waving across the screen as if they were the shutter on a camera, replicating the movement. 

We then looked at duration. A quote by Peter Gadal stated that 'There is a durational equivalence between shooting time and viewing time’ meaning there is equal duration between the shooting time of something and the time that it takes to view something.

We then looked at 'Pixilation', which is a is a stop motion technique where people, frame by frame, repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames, thus resulting in a 'Glide' effect. 
   

Neighbours by Normal Mclaren is a good example as it uses comedic elements to interest the viewer, with a strange narrative about a battle to get a flower between two men. This was visually interesting at the time as this was seen as a real experimentation with time and stop-frame animation. 

We were shown a film called 'Girl From Moush', which was an interesting piece formed around the an english-speaking woman discussing what its like in her home country, Armenia, however she has never been there. Images appear of building's, churches , people, art etc. The audio includes Armenian music and her voice dubbed over experimental visuals, such as colour correction and flickering imagery. I like this piece for its visual experimentation and the manipulation of film. The film appears to be pulled through a projector, giving it the gittery visual effect. 


We looked at the physical materiality of a film strip. We named the parts of the film to recap from when we last used film and spoke about the components. The components of film consist of the celluloid (the chemicals which make up the image), the sprockets (Holes punched into the film so it can play through a projector), then frames (the part of the film where the image lies), optical sound (the strip on a piece a film that contains the sound within the film) and the chemicals on top of the film which is related to the visuals of the film. We lastly looked at the materiality of digital film, which relates to the pixels and the coding of a video.