Today in class we made our own piece of film to project with an old projector and it was really interesting. I came to have a taste of how films were made before 1973, before the appearance of digital machines.
I attached some pieces of leaves, thread, laser cut outs, pieces of other films with the scotch tape and wrote and draw on it too. I finally cut the edges with a splicer and prepared it to be attached to another piece making together a 6 minutes long ‘movie’. Considering that normally is being run 24 film stripes per second, we would each have a 2 seconds projection.
Since it was almost everybody’s first time to actually make and project a piece of film it was difficult to predict what is that we were about to see. I personally supposed that I would see, even for a glimpse, all the elements I have attached to my film. I also expected to notice loads of imperfection like the edge of the tape, maybe some scratches on the film (since it has been bleached out and reused), maybe not so strong colours and definitely something different than predicted :). I was right on the series of my second prediction. The film run too fast for a single stripe to be distinguished from the others, and I only managed to see more clearly the round I draw on three stripes and the last dark element of my piece of film. We saw very clearly though a series of stripes representing a fun basic man sketch on a real football game scenes and it was because my classmate represented it in a slow motion from one stripe to another.
Since we had some time left, we run it a second time a bit slower, so we were able to distinguish more details between the stripes.
The overall visual of the film, besides the usage of other real scenes film cuts, was like watching at fast speed a gathering of marks. I also enjoyed the individual process leading to a collective work that we could admire as a whole and the reaction was between surprise and laughter so I’m sure we all enjoyed it.
I discovered a new approach to art.
Anda Avramescu 