unterwegs in Sachen Film >>> <<< on the road making films!
Wow, that was an intense day 😉
Filming paperships, swans from underwater, burning tea-saucers, sofa patterns, bridges, workers, seagulls. And it was also a darkroom day, spiraling film into Russian tanks, diving in chemicals, the magic moment when a film sees for the first time the projector light: blurring night lights (the magic B!!), snow traces, backwards walking sign-seekers, living trousers, subway lights, scary lamps … and more.
To be continued!
Yesterday it started to storm really heavily and today it was all fresh and cold and we had an amazing light outside, very melodramatic. Perfect for the first day of Wabi-Sabi-Filming!
My students are cool, the place is great, the weather plays with us, the first black+white processing made the first group film a masterpiece! More to follow. Tomorrow we will have some outdoor experiments, challenge coincidence to take us on a trip through Rotterdam. I’ll be back!!!
It’s a win-win situation! Once there was a guy called Manfred, a photographer, who has filmed half of his life with 16 mm and super 8 and then stopped it. Put his stuff away in the attic
and yeeeears later discovered me on the internet. He wanted to get rid of his stuff and he gave it all to me, knowing that it would be received with open arms 😉 one good NIZO camera and a lot of Kodachrome 40 film cassettes (Kodak stopped processing this type of film last year. It’s impossible to self-process it. There’s only one lab in the world as far as I know that offers processing for a good price, it’s Dwayne’s in Kansas, USA!).
I’m very thankful, it’s a precious gift.
It reminds me of another legacy story: As everybody knows the GDR was over in ’89. ORWO was the Eastern photo and Super 8 brand. I always loved it. Before the wall came down I sometimes went over the border (how easy for me as a Westerner!) and bought ORWO photographic paper and super 8 films. Smuggled it over. No real danger actually, it was not really legal to export it, but some films in the bag if they checked you was ok, no bad experiences.
There was one lab in (East) Berlin-Adlershof that, after the GDR merged silently into Westgermany, still continued to develop ORWO films for 2 more years. Until 1992. I remember, I often went there with the S-Bahn (interurban train) and brought them my films and got them back some days later. I went there during the closing period and when I went there for the last time they were all packing, throwing old folders on trash heaps, emptying their offices. All in silence, it was so calm and sad, I felt the winds of history, honestly!! I went into a room, sneaking around, met a man in a white working coat who looked really sorrowfull and we had some conversation and in the end he gave me an ORWO book of chemical recipes! I told him that I’m a self-processor and that I’m in love with film making and especially with the ORWO grainy warm-colored quality and I felt he was a tiny little happy when he gave me the book, knowing that it would fall in loving arms 😉
Thanks guys!
One super 8 frame is 1/24 second = 41.66666666666666666666666666666666 milliseconds.
Here’s one with beautiful lints! Can you find out what’s on the picture ? 😉
Whow!
Today was Animation Day!
(sorry for the out of focus picture above … my cellphone camera got too hot I guess 😉 /// we transformed the filmcenter into an animation center: 2 tables covered with moving things like fruit, lighting ducks, burning candles, bread, words written on paper … my students did a crazy good job animating, bringing objects to life! I’m proud of them.
