Glen's Experimental Film Blog

And here it is! Finally everything’s filmed, edited and done. It’s been a fun, intriguing and at times frustrating journey, but I’m glad to have everything wrapped up now. Below is a link to the film, thanks for following along!

While I have touched on my planning process a few times on this blog, I felt that I should discuss the issues I had planning my shoot in retrospect. I routinely wondered if I was fully committing to a truly experimental film as I had often thought that the content I was planning on covering was too narrative in nature. This paranoia resulted in me refusing to draft a shotlist or storyboard of any kind as I believed those devices would further hamper my experimentation and creativity. Of course, I still had a plan of what I would like to see in the film, but it was a rough plan and most of the shoot saw me winging it, going from one shot that I thought was interesting to another without any real rhyme or reason. I don’t necessarily think that was a bad move per se, but I do believe it made the shoot slightly more stressful than it needed to be

As is the case with my animation experiment, I have only recently decided to make a separate post on this stage in the experimentation. I had taken several pictures throughout my life and gathered them into a montage to mirror what I was inspired by in Come and see. Below is a link to that short montage. One of the issues with gathering all of these photos is the lack of consistency regarding aspect ratio, however I believe that this is acceptable enough given the existence of a portrait aspect ration in my animation sequence. This allows me to place the crafting of the mask (the exploratory) in one aspect ratio while putting the montage and animation (the introspective) in another.

While I had initially intended not to post this and simply use it in my final film, I now realise that I should show some more of my experimentation that I had done ahead of producing the final film. Below is a link to a short animation I produced to be a part of the film, it was my first attempt at any kind of animation so I was expecting to have a more difficult time than ended up being the case. I also wanted to avoid having a fixed camera angle for the animation as I thought that the slight movements in angle would add a choppy, unfocused energy to the animation, which I felt was a better visual fit for plan for the clip to represent a stream of consciousness surrounding identity and the disconnect between the true self and the image of a person. The result was choppier than I planned, but overall I am still satisfied with the outcome as a first attempt.

https://youtube.com/shorts/RUfhhPFpvZQ

I used scrap pieces of fur from an old coat to recreate my facial hair. I feel that this addition makes the mask far more recognisable as myself. Once again I filmed the process of adding the hair to the mask and I believe this will make for interesting viewing in my final film. I believe this full window into the artistic process will provide an insight into my view of appearance being seen as the reflection of the true self as a manufactured and artificial misconception from our own minds.

As tthe picture above shows, I have produced another cast of my own face, this time I felt a clear progression from my first attempt and I feel that this cast is more recognisable as my face. I recorded the entire process and intend to use a sped up version in my final film as I found the process of the cat’s creation to be visually striking. Next I will produce another latex mask and begin the process of adding hair to it to make it a more exact recreation of my image.

After viewing ABC in Sound, I was seeking out similar films when I came across Oskar Fischinger’s 1938 experimental piece An Optical Poem. The film aims to give music a visual form and can be seen as an example of rhythmic editing/animation in time with a piece of music. The intricate animation presents these cut out shapes dancing together in perfect time, and I find it very impressive that he achieved such rhythmic perfection given the limited stop motion animation approach that he was using. I fully believe that Fischinger achieved his goal in presenting expressive music in visual form.

In looking for inspiration and studying the forms of expression used in past experimental films I came across László Moholy-Nagy’s 1933 film ABC in Sound. Moholy-Nagy was a professor at the Bauhaus School and was known for being an innovator, even being called “relentlessly experimental” by art critic Peter Schjeldahl. Within this film he experiments with unifying the senses of sight and sound by using a low buzz that shifts in pitch and tone paired with some limited animation that at first appears as sketches resembling soundwaves only to start morphing into more expressive imagery.

Of particular interest to me were the sketches resembling silhouettes of people.

It amazes me that something so limited and lacking in detail can still be recognisable as a person. I am uncertain how exactly my viewing of this film will impact my own work but I found Moholy-Nagy’s experiments intriguing.

I took the idea of making a death mask and decided I would be best trying to create one of my own face as I wouldn’t be relying on another person’s availability to act as the model. I consulted some friends studying Fine Art and they informed me that my best bet would be to use mod roc to create a mould of my face and then create the mask using either latex or silicone. I wanted to get the artistic process within the film and I still intend to do that, however, I needed to ensure that the plan was feasible before I settled on using this method for the final film. We created the mould and created the mask with silicone, below is the result. Overall, I am very happy with how the mask turned out and am now fully convinced that this method should be used for the final film. I will say that I am not certain my facial hair picks up very clearly in the mask and for my next attempt I will add a faux imitation of my facial hair style to more convincingly reflect my appearance.

Been a while since I last checked in but I’ve got a lot of work done in that time, I’ve got quite a lot to talk about so I will be splitting these updates into different posts rather than keeping it all as one in a big unorganised mess. Firstly, as discussed in my visual concept post I settled on the theme of deconstructing the view of appearance as a true reflection of a person. I feel I wasn’t quite as in depth as I would like to be in that previous description of the idea so I would like to use this post to perhaps clear up exactly what I mean by this. I have always been drawn to the famous Descartes saying cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am as I find it fascinating that to any given person they cannot definitively prove that anything exists except for their own thought processes. While I do not want to examine the nihilistic possibility of quite literally everything being a non-existent figment of imagination I do want to examine the implication that a persons thought processes are the true self. As an example. I can look in a mirror, but what I am seeing is not truly me. After all, after I die and my consciousness fades my body will remain at least for a time. People can gaze upon the corpse and view it as me, but it isn’t, after death that body is like a vacant house, an empty shell where someone once lived. With this in mind I wanted to include a death mask of sorts in the experimental film. In an upcoming post I will discuss how I have approached creating such a mask and how I intend to incorporate it into the film.