earth, wind, water, fire

02.18.08

it's finally time to turn in our first project, the earth, wind, water, fire assignment. on the whole, i thought this was an incredibly interesting assignment. it exposed us to a lot of techniques used to make cameraless films, and they are all very interesting in their own right.

for the project, we decided to use some of our rayogram material for wind (the loose tea particles i used look strikingly like wind blowing), patrick painted with supplied inks for fire, i used magazine transfers to create the water section, and the earth portion was all-encompassing and present throughout, although mainly represented as brown throughout the film.

i found that i got the most intimate with the 100 frame animation section, as it really requires you to sit down and thoroughly think through what you are going to draw. as it turns out, it's a whole lot easier in your head than on film. my initial idea was a bit of strip to start the film, kind of showing the earth forming, starting as nothing more than a bunch of particles of dust and gas in the atmosphere, being drawn together to form a huge ball of fiery lava, eventually being cooled off (over thousands and thousands of years) by the atmostphere (enter the wind and rain elements), and turning into a suitable planet. then i tried to actually draw the planet starting with the formation of pangea, separating into the continents we know in present day, and actually doing a 360 degree rotation in that form (although i feel sure as though it didn't turn out like that. i suppose we'll see soon), and then drawing a simulated camera movement that "zooms" out to reveal the earth figure as the pupil in a mind's eye. perhaps just of the world itself. again, i know this is only going to be about four seconds long, and i'm interested to see how it turns out. the rest of that film strip i painted/drew/bleached on, kind of using as a "summation" for the project. using muddy type swooshes for the earth section in brown (incl. oils), wisps of dark blue for wind, wavy sponge paint in light blue (with overlaying waves drawn on) for water (also incl. oils), and complete chaos in red for fire. i used latex based paint on the emulsions side of the film, and drew on the base side with fine point sharpies.

splicing the film was an interesting experience too, as it took much longer and much more thinking through than i had assumed that it would.

again, i am interested to see how all of these projects turn out.


on another note, i thought the animation exercise we did in class on the 18th was great. forethought helps, but it's really being there and just actually executing the shoot that makes it happen. something like this takes practice, as you seem to run into problems along the way that kind of create themselves, ("how do you make pez levitate and "fly" through the air?") but it was great, and i can't wait to get the footage back into the edit lab to add sound effects and whatnot...