Film - Camera

So far, my experience with cameraless filmmaking has been a really interesting one. First and foremost, it’s a bit overwhelming. Thirty six feet is nothing when you’re filming (with a camera), but when you’re manipulating each frame individually, that’s a lot of frames (1,440 to be exact). However, I like the challenge. It’s also a comfort to know that if I mess up one frame, it will flash by at 1/24 frames per second. Of course, that also means that if I’m really proud of one individual frame, that will also flash by at 1/24 frames per second, so it’s a double-edged sword. It’s really fun, though, to be able to work with film. Being a projectionist and a budding film photographer, I’ve discovered in the past couple of years that I’m a film purist. I’m very pro-film in the film versus digital debate (the recent boom of 3-D films has only made this even more true) in all aspects, from filming to exhibition, and it’s really an incredible experience to work with film. I love seeing your image slowly appear when you dunk it into developer, it’s just such an exciting medium. You couldn’t take an SD card and dunk it into bleach, like you can film (well you could, but why would you do that?). The other thing that I think is really cool about this particular assignment we are doing is that with each play, the film is different. Colors will fade and chip away with each run through the projector. This almost makes it like an installation, in the way that it isn’t permanent by any means.

My experience with cameraless filmmaking has also given me an enormous appreciation for the film Passage that we watched on the first day of class. To consistently keep the shapes in the same part of the frame, and to have the colors constantly moving in rhythm and in continuous directions, the filmmaker must have been so patient. I can’t even imagine how much time that must have taken. Also, I’m curious to know if he had the soundtrack in mind when he created the piece, or if he made the piece and then found a song that fit really well with it. I know that in cartoons and things of that nature, they generally get the dialog first and then animate the characters to match it, so I’m curious to know what the general approach to sound married with animation is.