Film Frame

This event is past. Actually, all of the Experimental Film Society events (except one special one) for the spring semester have passed. I am relieved as well as saddened to be done with the constant barrage of minute, mundane tasks that were the running of EFS. (As well as larger, more interesting but similarly time and energy consuming tasks.)

This was a special screening for me. It wasn't the last screening, nor the second to last - those two spots were held by programs of work by Betzy Bromberg, an incredible filmmaker, teacher, and woman in general - but it was the last that I made a poster for. It was also the screening that I had the most to do with creatively. This was one of the few screenings Ross and I programmed that had more to do with a conceptual or stylistic idea as opposed to a convenient grouping of films we wanted to see. As such, it almost feels valid to say that I... curated... this screening.

Anyway, you don't care about that, you (ostensibly) care about the poster. Well, the poster is, you guessed it, more color copier color separation, this time using the technique to separate the different levels of frames-within-frames, avoiding overlapping colors and the combinations that result thereof. The only exciting about this specific instance was the color/frame layer made of two hands.

Most of the images that make up the poster were pulled from Google Image Search, but for the hands I used my MacBook's built in camera to take photos of my own hands. When blown up to 300dpi and 11x17 inches, however, the photos looked pretty shitty. So I printed them out at this size, then drew over them with a mechanical pencil to highlight the shading and creasing in the hands, as well as create a kind of faux-realist crisp resolution and increase visual interest. Then, I scanned the printout back in to the computer and composited it with the rest of the color/frame layers.

I know this story is not all that exciting, but I thought these photos of my hand over-drawing looked kind of nice. Enjoy.

Bong Hits for Voting

So I'm in a class right now called "Sound and Image" and for the most part I've been finishing soundtracks for House Fuck and The Mysic (both of which have been edited/altered since I posted them here) as well as another movie I'm working on called My Sister At My Mother's House. In the meantime, though, I still have regular assignments.

One of those assignments was to ADR some footage. ADR stands for Automated Dialog Replacement, and it basically means dubbing over something. So that's my voice that you hear in the video above. Actually, every sound in the video above is me doing something (the original video had a Tool song playing the background; I chose not to recreate that). I picked the original video because Marijuana Man seemed like a nice guy and I like his videos. I hope he's not offended. Thanks, Marijuana Man!

Are You Lonesome Tonight (Color)

 

Hey, remember this comic? I recently tabled the second annual Chicago Zine Fest, and I wanted Are You Lonesome Tonight? to be one of the comics available. (I also sold a considerable number of Dock Ellis comics, bike accident comics, and Motion Sickness posters.)

But, since I hadn't yet produced a nice run of Lonesome Tonight, I thought I'd add some color before doing so. Furthering my intimate relationship with color copier color separation, I experimented with paper towels, a pencil, and a light table to create textured, two-tone washes in the background of the comic.

The whole comic fits on two sides of one page (I drew it on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, but printed this run on a 11 x 17 sheet). I wanted to have two overlaid, misregistered washes of color on each side of the original B&W sheet, so I had to color in four different paper towel overlays, two for each side. I laid the original sheet (not seen above) on the light table with a clean towel on top, and used a soft graphite pencil to color around the Elvis impersonators and their word bubbles. While I was drawing each two overlays for the same side, I didn't compare, preferring to create the shapes from memory, and contributing to the inexactness of the shaded areas once the overlays were combined. You can see in the second picture above that the drawings do not perfectly match.

The other advantage of drawing this way on paper towels was the texture from the quilted pattern.

After I finished shading the paper towels, I took them to the color copier and made a photocopy of each, setting the printer to 'single color.'

You can see how the texture of the graphite and the quilted towels made its way through the copying process, ending up looking a lot like crayon drawings.

 

Finally, I copied these differently colored overlays onto my original B&W photocopied pages of line drawings. I placed the blue and green layers together, and the red and magenta layers together as well. Because I couldn't decide whether I liked the combination of red and magenta or red and yellow better, I made half of the comics one way and half the other.

A lot of people at Zine Fest told me they were impressed with my crayon drawings. I didn't know it would turn out with that identifiable of a texture, but I think it's pretty cool and it works well with the weird, melancholy attitude of the comic.