Old School Ginjavision

Ive been watching alot of stop motion videos on vimeo today, and its made me a bit nostalgic; for those days in college where stop motion was all i did...

Id go into the front room with a stool, and drape the curtains over it, to create a mini white infinity curve style stage set up, and then id get my little plasticine 'blobs' and take begin the whole stop motion process.

I remember the very first 3 i made i didnt have a tripod to put my camera on, so i used another stool with a pile of books and folders on top to get it to the right height.

My favorite was the one i did for easter, so i suppose it must have been almost exactly 4 years ago, cadbury cream eggs break dancing.

Watching it back now (and in fact all the videos on my youtube account,) is almost painful, the frame rate was something like 16, if that, so was no where near fast enough, but i was happy enough with the results at the time.

And it was all just for fun.

I think over the summer i would really like to make some more stop motion films, probably not with plasticine blobs, although i do still have them in my room, and to use it as a way to get away from the whole idea of an 'art film'.

I think after leaving the animation course, and hating it so much, i just wanted to get away from animation, and i started making far more artsy type films, which i have enjoyed, and i think are what i need to be making for the course, but for myself i think id like to go back and do some animation stuff again.

So i shall!!

And now for your viewing pleasure, some films!

(I would just like to say again i am horribly away of how jerky and slow they are, and i also apologies FoR TYpIng liKe thIs iN tHe CRediTs aNd TiTLeS!!)

Easter Egg Dance Off

Blobs 1 (which was the first even bit of animation i did!)

Blobs 2

Blobs 3

Blobs 4

Blobs 5

and there you have it! There are other various bad animations on my youtube page, but im sure you're cleaver enough to work that out and dont need me to link you to each and every one!!

More work for your viewing pleasure...

I have been continue my work on subliminal messaging, and think i have finally had a breakthrough...

so today i am here to show you 2 films. The first one is not great.

Newspaper Subliminal Experiment from Lana ap Rees on Vimeo.

Obviously, this is a continuation of my previous paper tear-away expeiremnts. I thought it was going to work be really successful, however, as it turned out it really wasn't. In fact you cant really see the words at all, which i know is the point of subliminal messaging, but i think these words are too abstract.

Cant really be bothered to say a lot more about it as it didn't work!

And then this is the second, and far more successful, experiment.

Hungary? Experiment from Lana ap Rees on Vimeo.

I am really happy with the way this experiment has turned out, and i think i have got a really good technique to develop.

In other news, i am back in Castle Lana for two weeks, 1 of which will be spent in New York, which i am super excited about, both for the shopping but also the artistic inspiration!!

And that is all i have to say for now...

Hit down with illness....

After last weeks constant working this week has not gone quite so well. To start with i got a cold, which keeps sort of going away, leading me to think im better, but then it pushes me down again and forces me to curl up in a ball in my bed. Which doesn't exactly led to good art making.

The weather has also been horrible, see last week was glorious and sunny and i did lots of work, this week has been rainy and dull and i have done no work. This things are clearly linked.

So basically i have done nothing at all week, this is also not helped by the fact that i had a tutorial booked for yesterday, i dragged my sniffling self in, sat around for 2 hours, realised lecturer man was clearly not in, got filled with anger, came home.

So in conclusion, i have done no work, i am ill, and i dont like the rain.

However today seems to be quite sunny, so maybe today i will achieve something....

And then on friday i get to go home

Oh look, some more work...

This week i have done a crazy amount of work, really its all very tiring.

I have been experimenting with different coloured materials, and how well they work on the film.

To begin with i continued using oil pastels, this time covering the whole strip in them, but found they were a) not bright enough, b) rubbed themselves off while being applied, and c) i just wasnt satisfied with the results.

I then moved on to acrylic paints, these were much more succesfull, bright, bolder and more appealing.

The last experiment i have done today is useing a technique i call ‘Newspaper Tear Away’. To do this technicque you use seloptape to lift the top layer of colour from a magazine page. I have used this technique in many of my other projects to great success, and as part of the first half of this project to create text on the film.

Newspaper Experiment from Lana ap Rees on Vimeo.

This time i just wanted to get colours, which i have succeed in doing. I am very happy with the outcome, i feel this is possibly the most successful experiment i have done today, as i feel it has many different ways of being developed.

I have only uploaded the video of this last experiment as i felt all 3 were fairly similar, so i would just show you the most successful and most relevant to the future of the project one.

Also i have had a break through with the pixelation issues i was having, which i think makes a great improvement to the quality of the film clip.

'I want to make art that makes you throw up'

oh yes indeedy i do. Well that and fall over, maybe start to fit, who knows.

So here are 2 film clips that i have been working on. I have a few more, but they are not fully edited yet, so you cant see them untill then.

Subliminal Experiment from Lana ap Rees on Vimeo.

The first one is me trying my hand at subliminal messaging, which doesnt work, the words are too pixelated, and too visible. But it has given me a starting point to try different methods.

ColourFlash Experiment from Lana ap Rees on Vimeo.

And the second film was me begging to play around with colour and flashes and such things. I used oil pastels to colour in the film strip, which works, but not as successfully as i had hoped, so it think next i will do some experiments into different materials.

As always vimeo has made the flashing effect much duller and stutter-y then it is on the original films. But at it gives you vague idea of what i am doing at least!!

24 frames of art a second

Sounds like a lot!!

Anywho, here is some work i have been working on for the past few days...

24 Artists in a Second from Lana ap Rees on Vimeo.

This was for an idea i has based on a phrase i use alot, '24 frames of art in a second'. This is the saying i use when i explain why i create films; for me when i see a painting or a photograph i see just a single frame, where as with my work, (especially the recent work i have been doing with cameraless film), i see it as 24 frames of art, each frame can be considered its own piece of artwork.

So i took this phrase and decided to play around with it a bit. The above films shows 24 famous pieces of artwork, played in a second!

I kind of liked this, i think it could have been really interesting, so i began to develop the idea a bit, as shown in the next film..

Artist Experiment from Lana ap Rees on Vimeo.

Ok, so this second film shows how i began to develop this idea.

I decided that rather then show 24 different pieces of art i would focus instead on a single image, but never show the whole complete piece. Instead i would show 24 different parts of the painting, leaving the audience to either work out what they were seeing, or just be bombarded with the imagery.

The idea being that i could then show many different pieces of art, and in affect show 'Art in 60 Seconds', playing with the idea that you dont have to spend hours in a gallery staring at one image, just simply watch my film and see all of art in a minute.

However, i do not think this film worked. This is mainly due to the fact that i tried to incorporate the cameraless film aspect back into it. This means that each frame was tiny, and thus when i made it bigger on the computer it became to pixelated to actually understand what was being seen.

It would have worked better if i had kept it all digital i think. This is one of the main reasons i have moved on from this idea. I dont like the thought of leaving camerlaess film behind. So i have gone back to my other of subliminal messaging and bombardment, but thought i would show you what i have been up to even though it is now all pointless!

just venting

ok, so i finally start doing like proper style work, ie working for more then 30minutes in a row, and it was all going fabby.

But now ive hit a wall, i dont no where i want to go. My work seems to have gone in 2 directions, 2 directions that cant both work together, theres a word for that but i cant recall what it is.

And i dont no which one to go with, the one that is actually inspiring me, but is quite possibly shit. Or the one that is what i am meant to be doing, but that i am stuck with.

It was all going so well to i realized these things. And now im not sure what to do, hence why i am typing here. God i wish uni was like college.

I also really quite want to create something with the film, like an actual thing, like a sculpture or something, which is quite unlike me, but i had this image in my last sketch book, it was of a victorias secret angel, walking down the runway, and she had these wings made out of film, and i think id quite like to make something like that, but out of the film ive done stuff too, but then why? what would be the point of that?

See i quite like just looking at the film stock on the wall, so maybe it doesnt even matter what the film looks like when played, maybe it should be about the filmstock being the art.

And now ive just given myself another option. I hate options, stupid things.

LOOK WHAT I WORKED OUT HOW TO DO

ok so there is nothing new to actually see here, but after 5 minutes investigation i have discovered how to embed the videos on this blog, not being able to do so was one of the main reasons i preferred the other site.

35mm FLASH Experiment from Lana ap Rees on Vimeo.

this is not a new video though, its the last one i did, i dont have any new films, i have nothing new, except a headache, i didnt have that before...

but somewhere below this entry is another entry about this film, like why i did it, so if you care, go find out.

this is all

some words i typed

i find it very hard to start work, i look back at the last project and i was filled with ideas and enthusiasm, yet when this project began i just stopped working. It was a 15 week project, and to my mind the deadline was so far in the future it didn't even matter. Yet now we have i think 5 weeks, i guess 7 if we're going to include easter in this, which im not really as i will be away for most of it. But 5 weeks to complete a 15 week project, and so far ive done an amount of work that i could have achieved in 4 days.

Yet i still cant bring myself to do anything, i look at my sketch book, the list of artists i need to research, the reel of film i need to bleach, and im just like 'yeh yeh yeh, whatever'.

And really this can not go on for much longer. Up until yesterday i could use the excuse i was writing my essay, but now i just dont have that luxury, that is no excuse i can give, im just being lazy, and its got to stop, NOW.

scary emails of the warning variety

i have just checked my uni email account, and in it was an email from some receptionist type person, that contained a letter from mike, the man in charge of fine art.

In this attached letter it basically says 'you never come in, start coming in or we will kick you off the course. this letter is an official written warning'

But i dont get what it is they want me to do, i could go into uni every day of the week, but im not going to achieve any work, because to do my work i need i need a sink, and bleach, and a clothes line, and a scanner, and my laptop. And ok the uni has scanners i could use, and i could take my laptop in, and i could set up a drying area for the pieces of film. but i doubt i am going to be able to do a bit of plumbing work and whip up a sink in the corner.

Thats the other thing that makes me unwilling to go into uni, there is no space, people who need to be in uni everyday to do their work have taken all the space, which is fair enough really. But it means if i was to suddenly decide on monday to go in and work there, there is no room for me to set up my drying area for film, let alone a sink.

And its just like, i produce work from home perfectly fine, i am in my own space, everything i need is to hand, and its all good. I go to pretty much all the compulsory lectures i am supposed mto go to, ok i missed one last week, but whatever.

So basically this letter that i have received has pretty much annoyed me greatly.