blinkety » adventures in pinhole animation

Thinking of pinholes

14 February, 2012 12:56 pm

Here I will try to answer the blazing question: Why?

Why pinhole images? What’s so special about them other than a certain appealing fuzziness?

For me the attraction comes down to specifically four things that a pinhole can do that (in most cases) a lens cannot. Not an exhaustive list but just what attracts me. We tend to think of advances in technology as a categorical improvement over everything that’s come before it. A lens is so much more sophisticated than a hole – how can it not do everything a hole can and more? And yet the humble hole has some inimitable properties.

1. Infinite Depth of Field.

Steve Irvine’s Parsnip:

In other words, something sitting right in front of the pinhole is as in focus as the farthest thing in it’s field. Impossible with a lens. Even with the widest of lenses there’s a limit to the DoF and something is going to be out of focus – (never mind distortion of perspectives). Infinite DoF can make miniatures look full-sized and provide an unexpected intimacy with objects

Steve Irvine’s Parsnip is a beautiful example and beautiful too are the the homemade pinhole cameras he makes.

2. Long and very very long exposures

By very very long I mean several years. Michael Wesely, one of my alltime favourite photographers made a famous 34 month long exposure of the building of the MoMA. But I find his more modestly timed photo of the New York Gay Pride Parade even more fascinating and haunting. It’s an exposure long enough to almost obliterate moving things and register only the immobile.

I’m also a huge fan of the work of Alexy Titarenko. This well-known photo of his has almost the opposite effect of accumulating moving bodies to fill the space. Using time to accumulate or obliterate elements with a pinhole is as intriguing as ‘capturing the moment’ with a lens.

3. To go where no lens has gone before.

You cannot put a 35mm camera into your mouth and you cannot then expect it to be able to focus on both the inside of your teeth and the world beyond. Justin Quinnell is the master at capturing images that are in every respect out of bounds to lensed cameras.

I also like the that the pinhole camera is unintimidating and at times inconspicious.

4. Distorted views

Reality can be distorted in poetic ways with multiple holes and double slits. Jeff Korte is brilliant for creative use of the multi-hole.

And so is the work of Udo Beck that takes photography into the realm of pure abstraction:

Posted in miscellaneous, pinhole images | Comments (0)

Look – it moves!

20 January, 2011 12:03 pm

What’s a blog about a film project without moving images. It’s about time I got around to installing support for movies. Goodbye grainy unwatchable Dailymotion links (only because I don’t want to pay for quality service). Here’s something that’s still blurry but bearable.

And now for the grand premiere I present here a sampling of some flower hopping. Older posts on flower hopping can be found here and here.

And now for some tests exploring what can be done with double slit apertures. I describe double slit apertures here. Interestingly the last sequence is the clearest and I made that one by cutting up a pop can with scissors. I’d have to check my notes but I think all the others were made with razor blades. I found no difference in quality even with my pinholes between the ones I made by hand and the lazer made ones.

Posted in videos | Comments (1)

After the Christmas break…

10 January, 2011 5:01 pm

As usual, my paying job and mothering job has taken over all of my time in the last few months. Scoping out a school for my son for next year is a biggie.

In the last week I was finally finally FINALLY able to do some editing. As I’ve mentioned some time ago, my planned shot called Zinnia Switcheroo didn’t work out and this left a big hole in the middle of the film. Filling it was the toughest part because it meant loosening up the master plan for my progression which was to go roughly from representational to wonky to completely over-the-top and back to representational. I have plenty of material to draw from but nothing of just the right wonkiness. So I filled it with a nice rhythmic sequence.

Todo (at least for the short term – and I really can’t think beyond my nose right now) :

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Back from limbo

23 November, 2010 10:17 am

The lab found my footage and I’m very happy with the results from last summer’s shoot. Most things turned out. Although pretty self-critical by nature I’m impressed by how far I’ve developed this technique from the first summer of shooting. I was particularly pleased with the un-pre-tested climactic sequence that strangely came out exactly how I saw it in my head. And how often does that happen! What didn’t turn out was the Zinnia Switcheroo - which will have to be replaced by something else. It was within frame this time but I don’t like it.

Next up on the to do list: get back my access to hexagram and transfer all the HD-SR footage to Targa files. Edit.

And look through the mail order seed catalogues for vegetable seeds. No more flowers next year.

Posted in pinhole images, project on the go | Tagged HD-SR, lab, Targa, Zinnia Switcheroo | Comments (1)

The lab lost my footage

17 November, 2010 10:48 am

Wow. I can only hope that they find it. To give you an idea of my state of mind – this news is at the very bottom of my current pile of stressors. Not to say that I won’t be unspeakably upset if the footage never shows up. Sigh…

Posted in miscellaneous | Comments (1)

Respite

2 November, 2010 2:32 pm

Within three days the Part Time faculty Showcase and Halloween have both passed! I can breathe ever so slightly before jumping into organizing a children’s birthday party and thinking of Christmas.

The Showcase was interesting. It was the first time showing any part of this project publicly and getting a bit of feedback. Most interesting was a suggestion that I should leave in all the dirt I was trying to clean up. Here I was thinking that it would be a distraction to see these unmoving specks and didn’t consider that the imperfection of this technique is what sets it apart from the current common digital work.

Just to rub in the lesson. I saw Barry Purves speak at the Stop Motion Film Festival. He’s a wonderful engaging speaker and very generous with his time and enthusiasm. One of his recurring themes of the evening was: how imperfections are what remind us of the hand of the animator and are part of the allure of hand-made animation. He mentioned that Nick Park fought to keep in the fingerprints on his plasticene Wallace & Gromit puppets.

A couple of years ago I showed my friend Louise the earliest version from my earliest shoot and to my horror it was footage that was transferred from film to digital by the most brutally crude means: a film projector’s projection diverted to a cheap handycam by way of a mirror. It was extra blurred with blown out colours and jittery. And She Loved the look. Unfortunately not a pinhole camera look.

So I think I’ll have to add back the dirt. Maybe I should also rethink evening out the exposures on sequences that were wonky from variable clouds. And maybe I should also reconsider using the footage that got burned from leaving open the viewfinder.

Maybe there’s nostalgia out there for the hair in the projector gate look too.

Posted in pinhole images, the idea | Tagged Barry Purves, dirt, hair in the projector gate, Nick Park, Stop Motion Film Festival | Comments (0)

The presentation is lurking ahead!

25 October, 2010 5:07 pm

There I go again not posting for a good long time. I thought I was busy before but there was another notch left to the flame. I had very little time to do anything project related so it’s not like I was holding back from posting anything exciting.

The film is at the lab and has been for a few weeks waiting for a spot to do the transfer to HD-SR. But there’s no time to get excited about getting back the results – I have to put together a public presentation by the end of the week! If anyone is in Montreal you can find me Friday (29 Oct) in the lobby of the Concordia University library building (1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd West) between 10am – 2:30pm attending to a small display consisting of some film loops and enlarged stills (if I can get them together, that is). This is part of a general showcase of part-time faculty members.

Unfortunately this day coincides with everything else that’s going on in my otherwise happily dull life: my son’s daycare Halloween party and the opening of my friend Erik’s Second Annual Stop Motion Film Festival (curiously also in the library building). So many good reasons for everyone to go to that building that day.

Posted in miscellaneous, pinhole images | Tagged HD-SR, Stop Motion Film Festival | Comments (0)

End of the roll!

29 September, 2010 8:56 pm

Finally! I was able to shoot the last few seconds because at long last my free time aligned with a day that didn’t have rain. I’m a bit sad this part is over. There are things I still wanted to try.

But I did get to try a bit of this double lazy susan idea. I have flowers set up like a carousel on one and the camera on another. With more time/film I would have animated the flowers hopping around – or at least have been better able to coordinate the speed of the flowers rotating with the speed of the swinging camera. I ran out of film but not before trying this with both a single and a double aperture.

Ah the possibilities of a rotating hop… my patient family would think there’s no end to the madness if I would continue this over another summer.

Posted in project on the go | Tagged double lazy susan, lazy susan, rotating hop | Comments (0)

16 seconds left to shoot

21 September, 2010 11:08 pm

I have a bit more than a meter of film left (not counting the bit for the tail end) which converts to about 16 seconds (400 frames). I could still do a couple of lovely things with 16 seconds but it won’t stop being miserable outside on the days when I don’t have to work or play mommy. I want to try something with two lazy susans – the camera on one of them and some animated flowers on the other. Pleeeze. Sun. Friday.

Besides being frantic over the beginning of school and calming my son who is having trouble transitioning from a butterfly to a penguin, I’m jumping into The World of Colour Correction. And it’s not so bad. At some point it clicked with me that as I’m working with image files I don’t need an editing software for colour correction when I’ve got the fantastic assortment of Photoshop tools at my disposal. So I borrowed a book that took a lot of the mystique out of the issue: Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction, by Dan Margulis

I had asked a technician at school if it were possible to colour correct without scopes by tracking RGB values. He said Nope. Impossible Without Scopes. But it still felt like a reasonable possibility. So it was encouraging to find the book had a whole chapter on exactly that. It’s a hard core book but it took the mystery out of curves and introduced me to channel mixing and it gave me the courage to dive into it. I figured that as long as I didn’t crush any of the colour channels I wouldn’t do any great damage if ever I should get professional online editing help.

I find this a lot of fun. When I’m lucky to have a white flower or a fencepost at some point in a sequence I can correct the colour cast (always a bit blue) with the neutral white as a reference and make a batch action for the remaining images in the sequence.

When there is no neutral colour for reference it’s trickier but the excellent book gave some tips for balancing greens by the numbers of which I have plenty. It also helps that that my film is a bit impressionistic so colour accuracy is not all important.

I had fun figuring out how to get rid of a glare that got into a sequence. The glare shows up only in the blue channel so I just burned in the overly light part of that channel and the result looks fine. I might learn later that it isn’t but I’ll go with fine for now because I need encouragement.

Posted in pinhole images, project on the go | Tagged colour correction, Dan Margulis, lazy susan, online editing, photoshop, scopes | Comments (0)

Making the titles

13 September, 2010 12:38 pm

Of course I did not finish shooting by the end of last week. Access to the sun is dwindling. I did manage to shoot titles – or reshoot them since I had tried it last summer. I had built another contraption (shown above) for burning titles into an image. My film is called “Con Brio” and I animate the words jumping into the frame.

I made a thing out of black foam core that would fit onto the end of a bellows (a black flexible square boxy thing that extends from the camera lens to a position in front of it for the purposes of superimposing things like titles). I attached a piece of acetate at the end with the title printed inverted (clear on black). My foam core contraption is hinged so that I could expose a nice garden background and then flip the acetate in front and further expose (burn-in) the words. The foam core contraption also slid on a crude track so I could animate the word going up and down.

It didn’t turn out as well as I liked because:
1) I was sometimes careless in making sure that the foam core was completely in place when I closed the hinge
2) Because I could not be entirely sure of the framing of the garden (and I wanted to frame with nice space for titles) sometimes the words and the background did not click all that well.
3) not a problem last summer but a possible one when reshooting is that if the pinhole is not perfectly centered, it can be slightly offset from the framing of the bellows. i.e. you’ll see a part of the bellows in the shot.

So this time around I decided I needed more of a sure thing. I shot the backgrounds and the titles separately and statically. I will later animate the titles and composite them with the background digitally. This way I’ll have the pinhole look and the digital control.

By The Way.. my cheap substitute for kodalith for the titles was to photocopy the titles onto acetate using a colour printer. Even though the copy will be black and white a colour printer will give better blacks. But not good enough. I actually printed everything three times and stuck the copies together with double sided tape. It takes three acetates to make the blacks light proof.
ko

Posted in project on the go, technical | Tagged acetate, bellows, burning in, contraption, foam core, kodalith, photocopy, titles | Comments (0)