Result!

Spent the whole day in the practice room in the deepest, darkest depths of The Arches today with Agoria and the rumble of the trains overhead for comfort working on material for my degree show. My initial idea of attaching cameras to dancers bodies doesn't look like it's going to work out - they were starting to make me feel sick never mind anyone else!

BUT I did spend more time working with torches and experimenting with different ways of filming and photographing the work. I love the initial results. It isn't a piece yet, but it will be. I just need to figure out a way of bringing it all together and making it "Screendance" in a way that'll keep everyone happy.

I don't really want to just photograph dancers with torches and slap it up onto a big screen so I need to figure out what I'm going to do with these images, how to manipulate them and make them into something more. Unfortunately I have a feeling that the one workshop that will help me figure all this out is After Effects, Monday-Wednesday next week and I'm busy editing Scottish Dance Theatre stuff for the Friday deadline.

Typical.

Photos here.

FireBox Rehearsal

I had the dancers in the studio for a few hours today working on some new material for a film we've been asked to be involved in (more on that next time) but I took the opportunity to try out working with lights and slow shutter speed techniques. Considering the dancers were improvising and we were only using mobile phones for lights I think the results are quite promising...



The top 2 images were taken with an 8 second shutter and the bottom 2 were taken with 4 second shutters. Even just being in the studio catching glimpses of the movement and the dancers with the naked eye was interesting so I'm looking forward to developing this idea further and think, with choreographed movement and photography, the effects could be very interesting.

Light Graffiti

I stumbled upon some light graffiti artists recently and it occurred to me that it'd be a really interesting way of capturing movement in a still image. There are a lot of people doing this at the moment, some of the best I've found are Lichtfaktor and this film clip (scroll to the bottom).

I happen to have some glow sticks handy and a few bike lights to experiment with this weekend so hopefully I'll have something to show next week.

Painting by Keywords

I was pointed in the direction of net.art generator by Dan and spent ages on it last night creating images from keywords. The idea is that you stipulate keywords, net.art generator searches google images for matches and collages those images into a new image.

I restricted myself to 'firebox', 'dance' and 'theatre' and was quite pleased that the majority of images included were my own (my meta tagging must be pretty accurate). Some of them are really interesting and some are awful but that's part of the fun. It seemed to me like painting by numbers but with even less skill involved but I'm sure it won't be long before someone convinces a gallery to exhibit this as their work.