Looking for a term to describe the non-video part of Moving Image, the non static art contraptions.
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I also realise that I have for some time being moving away from video, and making moving image from drawings. I have become quite selective about taking random footage. If I involved in a project then I will take many takes to get it right, but I feel I made a decision a few years ago not to overload with footage - if I cannot know and find what I have taken, it's worse than frustrating and confusing for me. Similar with photos. I must have ways of accessing what I have done easily.
Recent tutorial with Caroline has slotted in a key to next film/moving image project.
I am going to make daily or almost daily drawings, in a format still to be exactly decided. I will then merge them together into a film. I will spend one hour on each drawing, make 60 of them and make a film lasting one hour. That is my initial aim which may change a bit, or grow, perhaps even grow alot.
This is something to do with time, and I have an idea that the title will reflect that - merging time together, creating some out of synch experience of time. And something to do with the way making a thing creates it's own pulse or stream of time, that you can pick up something you were making months ago, and reconnect exactly with the feelings of before. Sometimes I hear a song or see a film, and remember vividly something I was making while it was on before - every little detail of the atmosphere.
Enough to start with.
Suddenly I have the solution to making moving image like a novel - it's starting, seeing what emerges, how it evolves, what problems and solutions I give myself.
I seem to absolutely have to have some sort of structure or idea to create in order to make work.
5th July 2012
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This one minute work in progress I have also recently sent to the Glasgow Artists Studio, who are collecting work for a mixed group exhibition. Perhaps strangely, I have never yet shown work in my home city, or my home country. It would be wonderful to break that duck.
PS - didn't get that this time. I will do Glasgow next year!
One minute work in progress using abstract drawings, and the ideas I intend to develop. I may mix this with actual video or photos - something recognisable and readable.
13th September 2012
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Very excited now that I am filming the drawings as well as using the photos to make the moving image. Really, really excited actually, and I'm glad I held off until now to do it - the drawings needed to process in my mind and have a bit of space and time. And now I see. I see two things:
1. What it is of the drawings that I want to show - how to focus and edit them further to isolate the important elements. As I suspected, some drawings work better than others through the video camera - I always made them with this processing in mind, and so I can predict which will be more or less effective. It's not completely predictable, of course, and some elements look better to me than others -
2. After not taking video for a while, I relearn, resee, am reconvinced about what the medium gives me and why I prefer it. It allows me to make the viewer look at a thing in a certain way - my way. I was encouraged once when an other artist looked at a piece of my work and said they'd never seen something which so shows the way an artist looks at things before -
It is too time consuming to upload examples from my film computer and various compatibility issues, however, what the camera is allowing me to pick out from the drawings is the tarry, silvery, metallic surface of lead or graphite. The surface glints which speaks more of the drawing as an object rather than just an image, conversely through digitising them.
14th November 2012
How I make Moving Image
It is impossible, really impossible to describe how I actually make the moving image. I have been thinking about that as I make some now, and have to conclude that I either make it or describe how I tend to make work. I can't describe the thoughts that lead me make all those choices and decisions, but here is an attempt.
Like the drawings project, I tend to amass images and clips, and hone them, edit them, until they are exactly distilled and have no more than I want - this means polishing them, checking they do not include extra lines, marks, images, etc, getting them to the right colour and light balances, saturation, etc. Especially with stills work and black and white work, I will have all along also imagined it in negative, and at this stage I will have every image in positive and negative, ready to go. I tend to keep them in making order so that I can remember where to find them. For the drawings I have 120 images, so 60 positive, 60 negative, which I can keep in my head.
Then I make the piece by making each frame or clip move as I want it, bearing in mind what it will be moving into or from. During this process I may reorder them, make them go forwards or backwards, and as if moving in another dimension, near or far. I find that the pace of the work emerges then - what seems right overall, which I can micro-vary or disrupt as appropriate. I balance the strength of images with the more subtle, perhaps the background with foreground, bearing also in mind the extra shapes and imagery created by layering and juxtaposition and negative spaces.
It's better to keep these connections in my head. It's complex and layered, but something I can do. Occasionally there is a collection of clips that require me to keep a written system to make sure of an order, but I prefer it to be held in my mind, as a written system soon becomes difficult to keep up with.
I'm including all the shades and versions of the images I can muster, while also editing away weaker or boring ones I try not to linger too long on the most interesting parts, but echo those or counter them with something different.
All this while I will usually still be thinking of a title and some writing to summarise the work, and which is part of the work, and so it seems that here I am seeing and understanding what the work is about, and looking for ways of grasping and expressing that.
I am also looking for beauty, and other things that I might describe as lack of scale, certain illusions of movement, conflicting time-lines, subtlety, things that can be mistaken for something else, suggestions, a certain clarity.
I have multi-streams of moving image in my head with these images, which I aim to resolve in one flow, like a complex thought. What is going on in my head is employing, stretching, breaking the rules in my Art Manifesto:
http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/art-manifesto.html
I add to these rules and discoveries through each work, and sometimes have unifying theories about my working and creative processes, which I adopt from then on.
Crucially, what I refer to when actually making work is aesthetics and imagery I have made before or seen and registered - ways of looking at things, memories, works I have made. I look to my own visual language and repertoire and make those links and connections. That is the only validity for me. Everything else, outside ideas, influential artists, novels, films, are all secondary.
27th November 2012
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