An Amazing Discovery in my Parent's Attic

I went to my parents house this past weekend and had an amazing discovery. In their attic I found a vintage 16mm camera from the 1930's, as well as an Austrian 8mm camera. Both cameras still work and are spring-wound. The story behind the 8mm camera was that it belonged to my grandfather's brother who lived in Hungary. He had the camera with him when he traveled from Europe to America. The ship he was on was called the Carpathia which stopped along its journey to rescue survivors from the Titanic. I was amazed to find these cameras along with old film reels from the 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's. Some of the 16mm footage was transferred to DVD by my dad's cousin and was in black and white as well as color. The film looked great still to this day and included footage of trips they went on like Washington DC in the 30's, South Florida in the late 30's, and unreal footage of pre-Castro Cuba in the 30's. The most impressive was B&W footage filmed by my grandfather when he took a trip to Hungary in 1947. He was a politician who was involved with an American association of Hungarian immigrants or something and he filmed orphanages, old buildings with bullet holes from WWII, as well as the streets of Budapest a couple of years after the war. It was an amzing discovery and I look forward to using these cameras on my own. I hope to use the found footage in some way as well in the near future, maybe for our 6th film.

Brakhage

I found this picture on-line and thought it was cool so...it looks like the film strips we made in class.

The Elements

After the screening of the Film Manipulation assignment I was amazed on what an amazing job everybody did. My partner on this project was John Marshall and we split the elements between us. I gave him the option of picking the 2 elements he wanted and he chose Fire and Water. He said he wanted to draw a design over the entire strip of the two film strips and then cover it with a magazine transfer. We met one morning to work on the film strips and used Sharpies to draw what we wanted on the film. He used tribal looking designs up and down the strip while I integrated designs with sequential drawings to simulate an object moving along with words spelled out across different frames. For Wind, I used a tree blowing back and forth and a tornado spinning furiously. For Earth, I drew the planet earth spinning around on its axis and grass in a field. After that meeting we completed the project on our own. I used magazine transfers to cover the remaining portion of the film strip that had not been manipulated. I then bought acrylic markers and drew over the magazine transfers and over some of the previously painted strip.
After screening the spliced together film as a whole representation of the elements I was pleased with what I saw on screen. Earth and Wind went first and the tree looked like it was moving in a gust of wind, the tornado looked like it was spinning, and the earth looked like it was in space. It was hard to draw the planet earth on a single frame for 15 consecutive frames, but when it was shown I believe the image was received as being earth. Fire and Water came next and it looked excellent as well. John and I both agreed that we wanted to see the drawings that were covered by the magazine transfers. After we saw it on screen we both figured that a better idea would have been to do the magazine transfer and then draw the design over it. Overall I was impressed by the creativity of the class. It was a great project that I might do on my own outside of class.

Objects

Trying to prepare for the multi-plane animation and getting together some objects to use. I wish I still had a lot of my action figures from when I was younger. Everything I have is pretty bulky, just trying to figure out how all the objects will come together. I've been looking for a second option on the background but I'm having a hard time finding that as well. I'm looking forward to this project and I think it will be a lot of fun. So far everything has been pretty cool in this class. I like the hands on aspect of everything and really feel like I'm learning something each week.

Superbowl Sunday

I have to be honest...this blog will be all the 6X1 work that I will be doing today. I have worked a little on the film strips and I am about 3/4 of the way through with the painting on film assignment. I have been collecting a couple of cool items to use in the animation project we are doing on Tuesday. I've been interested in doing multi-plane animation ever since learning about it in Dr. Kreul's History of Animation class. This project seems like it's going to be fun. I'm still working on the project where we have to draw the shape progressing into something else. Today, I have to film an hour's worth of footage for a documentary we are editing for Intro to Editing. Just trying to keep pace with all of the work.