The Mystic

Way back when, in the last months of 2009, I completed my greatest in-camera technical feat to date: The Mystic, a 100ft roll of color negative film that passed through my Bolex six times, bi-packed with sequins, shot through a matte box, painstakingly frame counted: basically the culmination of every intricate and tiresome film technique I had learned during the previous months, and a narrative (sort of) to boot. My original blog entry details these processes. But as proud as I was of the project's (almost complete) success, I knew that it needed something more.

In the ensuing years, I realized that what really bothered me about the original Mystic was its length. Each 'shot,' while carefully timed to an exacting plan, would flit by without the chance to sink in. I needed the film to take the time to overwhelm and hypnotize the viewer, the same way that the mystic hypnotizes himself. I decided to extend each sequence almost threefold, sometimes more, and I began to think about a soundtrack that would mimic the irregular strobe of the sequin, and assist in mesmerizing its audience.

The difficulty lay in extending the film without making it obvious that I was repeating frames over and over each other. I watched my workprint on a Steenbeck, making careful notes about which frame began and ended each shot, when the film was fogged or intense scratches ran through (jumping back and forth from fogged frames to black ones would be obviously unnatural, so I had to repeat within and around each faded section) and then diagrammed a complex, randomized route from which to create a new internegative, using the Oxberry optical printer at school.

Before I could make my internegative, however, I had to do a couple of other things. I wanted to add credits to the movie, make my own name more readable (the end of the film attributes one frame to each letter of my name) and fix the scenes in which Aj only appears on one side of the mystic's crystal ball. To do this, I photographed cut out letters onto HiCon using the animation stand, and colored two single frames with sharpie to use as bipacked mattes on the Oxberry (in order to rephotograph only one Aj into the scenes from which he was lacking). I took my titles, my mattes, and my workprint, and spent two whole days in the hot, hot, dark room that housed my beloved optical printer. The first time, I messed it up, so I had to do this process twice.

After I completed my successful internegative, I transferred it to make the video to which I synched my soundtrack. I collected laugh tracks, audience sounds, and applause from the BBC sound effects library and all over the internet, and cut them up in Pro Tools, rearranging and repeating them in much the same way that I repeated the frames of The Mystic. I gathered a different set of laughs for each shot, so that it sounds different when you're in his head than when you're watching the two of them. The tone over the flashing sequences was Ross's idea, and one I am incredibly grateful for. The clapping rhythm over the "I SEE" section was a happy accident, but it's one of my favorite parts of the film. I really like how it drives the film into epileptic overstimulation. I kind of think this is a movie about television.

The clip above is only a piece of the finished film, which is just under eight minutes. I'm only giving you an excerpt because I want to submit this movie to festivals and sometimes they're weird about it being online too. I also think, as most analog filmmakers do, that to really watch this piece you've got to see it on celluloid in some approximation of a theater setting. That being said, if you really, really want to see the whole thing and you can swear to me on your life that you understand the compromised viewing environment that is Vimeo, shoot me an email and maybe I'll give you the secret link.

Zoo Gradation Separations, Color & Cross Dissolves

 
Remember this? The footage I shot at the zoo, which I then created several HiCon mattes of, isolating the blacks, whites, and greys? Well, after my experiments recreating the image from the original negative as well as different textural stand-ins, I decided to move on to recreating it with different colors filling in for each gradation. The images you see above are two of the very few successful frames resulting from this attempt. Again using the Oxberry OP, I photographed each gradation separation matte in conjunction with a mock orange mask and various color filters, transitioning between colors with cross-dissolves, three times onto 3383 color print stock. Had I not overexposed everything, (or, really, underexposed by overlighting) I would have ended up with an awesome version of the same footage where each restricted gradient of zoo footage gently oscillated between random colors in beautiful psychedelic tandem.

Before I attempted the above experiment, however, I did fuck around with some other techniques, namely bipacking the original negative with the gradation separation mattes and a fake orange mask and cross-dissolving color filters. Probably because of the extra film strip (the negative), this attempt was (kind of) properly exposed and turned out some beautiful results.



This video begins with a straight up positive print of the footage, which I included to see how my orange mask was working out. I underestimated the amount of orange I needed, which is why everything looks sepia-toned. This becomes irrelevant as soon as the multiple exposure (due to cross-dissolving) kicks in - as soon as the ducks come out you can see me switching around the color filters. I had not yet added the gradation separation mattes, and at this point it's still a straightforward, though colorful, positive print.

Of course, none of it looks straightforward at all, because the film is out of focus and the frames are jumping all over the place. This is because I made the amateur mistake of forgetting to close the gate in the camera, so the print stock was sliding all over the place. I remember being confused because the frame count kept getting out of whack on the camera and the projector, and now I know why, and what to do if it happens again. In these still frames you can see how I intended the cross-dissolve colors to combine, and how they look when they're separated by misregistration:

I also love it when all of a sudden there's a frame that found its place in the gate, and managed to be in focus:

Ultimately, in this instance I'm happy I forgot to close the gate, because it gets really cool when the zebra comes in. At this point in shooting the print I locked into one frame of the negative, and began combining it with its black/grey/white mattes. I exposed each separating matte with the still frame and plenty of cross-dissolving color filters, rewinding the film each time to shoot the next separation. In the end I had exposed the same strip of print stock about six times, accounting for each gradation and the cross-dissolves included in each of those runs. Of course, I didn't know my film was helter skelter inside the camera. Here are some nice stills of that crazy shit:

At the end of the video the zebra image fades out and you start to see just the shape of the misregistered frame. I was continuing with the filters and dissolves, but because I took out the negative and the mattes I ended up over(under) exposing everything and all there is the shape and a slight glow from the changing filters.

Technically this project pretty much resulted in disaster, but I still love some of these images and the things I learned from my mistakes are incredibly valuble. Next up: intentional psychedelia and sci-fi themes. I'm done with zoo footage.

Zoo Gradation Separations, B&W

Another step in my exploration of matting in and out of camera. I now am familiar with the school's optical printers, which is an ecstatic experience to rival that of being born again (not that I can speak personally to that, at all). Here's what I did to the footage above, of which there are three segments:

The first segment is just a positive print onto Hi-Con of my camera original, shot on Plus-X negative at the Lincoln Park Zoo, tape spliced together and timed for printing on the Oxberry Optical Printer. I hand processed the negative and positive and all other generations and variations of this film in my Lomo Tank.

The second segment gets into the point of this project, which was to create traveling mattes. What I did with all the footage was photograph it onto Hi-Con using various ND filters in order to achieve a very dark and a very light version of the image. I then rephotographed these films onto more Hi-Con in order to have the negative of these versions. I then created another strip of film by double exposing the positive, under-exposed matte and the negative, over-exposed matte (both hi-density, emulsion-wise, so that those grey areas of the camera original were blocked from being exposed) to achieve a matte which isolated the middle of the B&W spectrum. Then, I took three of these mattes - the grey isolation matte, the positive under-exposed matte, and the negative over-exposed matte - and rephotographed the negative three times, triple exposing another Hi-Con film strip so as to re-create the original image, but all jacked up by being separated into its varying gradations.

The third segment was created through the same process as the second, except instead of bi-packing the camera original with my three gradation mattes, I bi-packed a still frame of three different cloths of varying shades with each matte. So, the image is still there as well as the movement, but it is created entirely through three different still pictures whos shapes are morphing into different animals.