Some filmstrips with my own blood smeared on them for Blutrausch:
Exposing Film with High Voltage
Before I made Energie! I experimented a bit with high voltages. My first idea was to do stuff with filming the sparks of the tesla coil I build. But that didn’t amount to much. Then I thought it would be interesting to expose the filmmaterial directly with high voltage discharges. But somehow I wasn’t really excited about how it looked like when projected. See for yourself:
A total showing some other stuff on my lighttable. I’ll get into the xray stuff at a later date.
Here is a clip with the projection of the above material and also the high voltage discharges of my tesla coil. Since my bolex operates mechanically I was able to get it really close to the discharges (some sparks even hit the camera body during the filming) without having to fear destroying the camera. That wouldn’t work with a video camera;-)
Growing Crystals for Kosmos
Some pictures of filmstrips with crystals that I grew on them for Kosmos:
New Category: Sketches/WIP
I added a new category to show some sketches of films I made and also sketches and experiments of work in progress that might or might not lead to a new film. Also I like to give more detailed technical explanations of the stuff I’m doing. As my work is often, at least to a certain amount, process driven it seems only logical to make the process more transparent. The first film featured is Gestalt. I posted 12 small clips from very early sketches to ones that more resemble the finished film.
The Last Gestalt Sketches
Slowly the film took shape. There was one particular formula that gave the most interesting results. It was also the most complex one so rendering took a long time. Here are two little sketches that already resemble the finished film.
More Gestalt Sketches [now using Quat]
Reading a book about fractals I saw an image of a fractal that looked pretty much the same as the ones I was getting with Frax4D. These were called quaternions. Now that I knew what I was actually dealing with I did a quick google search and found the freeware Quat. It was much more powerful than Frax4D and also more open to animation. Although it was only a single image generator it was open enough for me to write a small plugin that was feeding Quat with parameters for animation sequences. Furthermore you could choose between four different formulas. Below are some examples.
Gestalt Sketches [The Frax4D Beginnings]
It was in 2000 or 2001 when a friend showed me the Frax4D Photoshop filter that was part of Kai’s Power Tools 5 (or KPT 5 in short). I was very much fascinated by the alien forms and shapes it was capable of creating. The first thought I had was that it would be interesting to do an animation with it. So I created some short clips using Frax4D (see below). It was rewarding and frustrating at the same time. The interface was not very good for animation. The values were all changed with sliders and you couldn’t enter numeric values. But I liked the results I got.
Darklight
Energie! will be screened at Darklight in Dublin [Ireland] this month.
LIAF & NeMe – The Mirror Stage
Energie! will be shown at the London Int. Animation Festival and at NeMe- The Mirror Stage in Limassol [Cyprus] in september.
Independent Exposure
Energie! will be screened at Microcinema‘s Independent Exposure in San Francisco and other cities.