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.

Matte Box Experiments

Before filming The Mystic last semester, I was experimenting a lot with the Bolex mattebox, cutting my own mattes with different flaps in them so I could expose different parts of the image at a time. I worked on creating composite images and multiply exposed images in camera. These trial runs helped me immensely in figuring out how to complete The Mystic.



This was my first experiment. I exposed one v-shaped section of the frame at a time, keeping the camera in roughly the same place (this is filmed from a concrete wall at the intersection of LSD and Monroe) and letting each shot run for about 30 seconds, a full wind on the Bolex. Those dark shapes at the top right of the frame are my fingers holding the flaps up, one at a time. I had to rewind the camera between each exposure, so this strip of film was exposed six times.



This was actually my last experiment that day, in the darkened cafeteria of the Columbus Building. I wanted the shapes to look like they were traveling across the frame, so I used the frame counter to rewind between each take back to the middle of the previous one.



This was my second try (and first success) at making triple exposed matted images. For this shoot I planned out a series on my stright-cut flap matte. I wanted each section of the frame to be exposed three times. I wrote out the sets so that the whole film would be run through the camera six times, with a different organization of flaps open each time.

The Mystic

This is a film called, obviously, 'The Mystic'. It was my final project for my Image Making class last semester. I made it over one weekend on one 100' roll of 500T color negative film stock, completely in camera. Following is the long complicated explanation of my methods for those of you geeks actually interested:

The first run of the film through the camera was the most difficult one, since it included bi-packing in the bolex this srip of sequined film every six feet or so. The strip ended up (after splicing only the sequins together, cutting out the empty sewn parts) ten seconds long, and I had worked out that my film would be about two and a half minutes (giving me ample room on either side, since the entire roll is almost three minutes long), meaning I had to pack the sequins into the camera and run it for ten seconds exactly fifteen times. Because this process of loading and unloading the camera had to be done in the dark, I physically marked my film by punching three holes with a hole punch at the very start, and one small thumbtack prick between each run of sequins. I would set my two daylight spools up on the rewinds, in the dark, and then actually tape the sequined strip to the most recent punched hole in the film, roll it up on the spools, and then re-thread the camera being careful to place the taped frame in the gate. When ten seconds had been shot, I carefully wound the camera to the exact frame count, turned off the lights, opened the camera, used a thumbtack to punch through whichever frame was in the gate, unthreaded the camera, set up the spools on the rewind arms, untaped the sequined strip, and started again from the pin prick that I could feel for in the dark.
When I was shooting this bi-packed part I had a lens on the camera (10mm to be exact) and was shooting a blank white wall I had illuminated. I had a matte box attached to the front of the Bolex and on it, a circle matte I had made. The black letters in this film (the dialog, as it's supposed to be understood) were accomplished by cutting out letters from black paper and taping them over the front of my circle matte for specific frame counts.
After all of this I rewound the film again, removing the sequined strip, and synced up my hole punches, then wound the film to the specific frame counts (there was a lot of math and charts and frame counts drawn out before this process started) in which I wanted the glowing white letters. Here, I placed over my circle matte more mattes I had cut out, this time with the negative space being the letters. Then I shot all of the letters I wanted in white as well as the flashing sequences towards the end.
The next step involved rewinding again, recruiting my friend AJ (thanks AJ!), and setting up a simple little set in the shooting space. We put a cloth on the ground and made this crazy light-box thing with brown paper and some chairs and plywood we found lying around, so that there would be a circular light in roughly the same spot as the sequins would have been flashing, so that in the finished film it would look like a crystal ball or something that was illuminating AJ. I made another matte for the camera, this one being the opposite of the first circular matte, a solid circle suspended in front of the lens. You can see the tape holding it up in some of these shots. I also matted off the right half of the frame. Then I had AJ sit and look serious, wearing very little clothing, and wave his arms around. I shot the required number of frames (all counted out beforehand!) with some single framing to make it look choppy and weird.
Then I rewound the film again, removing the matte over the right half of the frame, to the places in the roll where I wanted the close ups. Here I had AJ sit with his forehead against the matte box and squint while I ran the camera at regular speeds and single framing.
Another rewind of the camera, and AJ and I deconstructed our light box and set it up again facing the opposite direction. I matted off the left half of the frame this time and shot AJ again looking serious, but without the arm waving. We cleaned up the space and AJ put his clothes on. Then I dropped the film off at the lab.

OK! If you read all that, thanks. I was in a state of suspended mild anxiety the whole time since a lot of this stuff I was trying for the first time - mostly, I hadn't done all of those things all at once before - and there were so many ways I could of fucked it up. The room in which I did all my bi-packing was not entirely light proof, which shows in the fogging of parts of the film, but I don't really mind that. There is only one place in which I seriously didn't get what I wanted, but you have to ask me or guess if you want to know what it is.

I conceived of and executed this film in about four days, and because of that I feel that it's not that conceptually interesting. Visually, I think, it's a resounding success and I am very excited about the future possibilities opened to me by this experiment. I'd like to use these techniques and more considered ideas to make similar films that actually mean something. I'll keep you posted.