My Thoughts/Experience with Cameraless Filmmaking

I really enjoyed the experience of working on our cameraless filmmaking projects thus far. I love the fact that we are actually working hands on with the celluloid. It gives it a true organic feeling as opposed to working on these types of effects in the digital world.

I like how we jumped into it the first week of class with scratching on film. After watching a lot of Stan Brakhage, Naomi Uman and others in History of Avant-Garde, I would often wonder how the actually went about manipulating their film stock to achieve their desired effects. Getting to do it myself really put things in perspective and made me think what I need to do frame to frame to make and image I had scratched move. It’s really the same concept as doing and animation in a program like Toon Boom or Flash. Every frame must be a little different from the one prior and you must do the math for 24 frames per second to time out how long you want the movement to take to get to the desired place. I also like the fact that you really don’t have to make things very complex; you can make your creations more simple or abstract, because there is no right or wrong way to show your vision.

I loved doing the magazine and newspaper transfers as well. It was sort of like being in art class and making collages, but on a much smaller scale being that your canvas is only this tiny piece of film. When we got to see what our creation looked like when played through the projector I was pleasantly surprised. The colors, shapes, and textures that we created in such a short period of time were beautiful. I can see where you could use this process in making something very elaborate if you took the time to plan it out properly.

Doing the Rayograms, totally made me look at filmmaking in a new way. It gave the x-ray look to the objects we place on film, which I thought was really awesome. It’s great how you can get something so cool on film from such a simple process and concept. It only took about ten–fifteen minutes total for each of out five foot pieces of film. I saw so pictures online of various Rayograms where people used their hands and bodies on the film to create the image. I haven’t got to do the painting on film yet, that’ll be this week for me. I’m very excited to do so, it’ll add yet another tool to my cameraless filmmaking tool kit.

This experience really made me look at filmmaking in a new light. It makes me realize that the options to this type of filmmaking are virtually endless, depending only on your imagination and creativity.