IMPERCEPTIBLE TRANSMUTATIONS
Imperceptible Transmutations on Vimeo.
Ryerson Visual Studies 2. Stop Motion Animation.
I had originally been inspired by the old Looney Tunes cartoons Duck Amuck and Rabbit Rampage in which the lead cartoon characters (Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, respectively) are mocked and eventually erased by the off screen animator. I mentioned it to my friend Nathan Storring, a frequent collaborator who is currently attending OCAD University, who said he would help as he was required to do a similar project for one of his courses.
Originally I thought of creating a similar animation in which I played the animated character only to find myself erased by the end of the short. However, in the end I took a similar but different approach. In my version I would find myself rubbing myself out using a cloth. To be safe I decided to shoot both, I would take on the second version and Nathan would do the first.
The whole idea reminded me of the early silent films of Georges Méliès (in fact the title of the piece comes from one of Méliès shorts), and as such I decided to appropriate the aesthetics of those early worn out silent films.
I first had Nathan photograph me performing the scene using the burst mode on his camera. This mean that while there would be a series of stills it wouldn't be perfectly fluid resulting in a jerky movement similar to that found in silent films. I then took those photos into photoshop and began the process of erasing my body frame by frame.
Once this was finished I put the frames back together using a still-animation program called iStopMotion. It turned out that the motion was still a little too fluid and so I had to experiement with differing frame rates to get the look that I wanted. This led me to research the common frame rates of the era which resulted in me finally settling with 16fps with each frame doubled so the same image would be on screen for two frames. When played back at full speed (29.97 fps) the resulting video played back at the perfect speed and looked very convincing.
The final step was to take this clean digital video and make it look nearly 100 years old. Rather than using a simple plugin in Final Cut Pro I decided to try a more old fashioned approach. I gather a bunch of stock footage of old film (from the ArtBeats Film Clutter collection), various bits and pieces of dust and scratches and started to layer it over the video. Using a combination of techniques the resulting video footage looked as though it had been run to the projector a few too many times over the course of nearly a century. The final step was a quick pass through Magic Bullet to add some subtle gate weave and gitter, adding a title card (in the style of the old timey films, which also was passed through Magic Bullet) and some footage I had shot a few years back of my family's projector. For music I headed to the Internet Archive and dug through their collection of old 78s and found a track from the turn of the century that fit the tone perfectly.
The result was a short, but sweet video that featured a man erasing himself in the style of the great silent classics of Georges Méliès.
To see the other half of this collaboration visit Nathan's website.
Music: Arthur Collins with Vess L. Ossman
License under the Public Domain @ The Internet Archive
Technical Details:
Black and White/Colour
Digital Video
Created using Photoshop, iStopMotion, Final Cut Pro and Magic Bullet
Compressed using Apple Compressor 3.0
IMPERCEPTIBLE TRANSMUTATIONS by Adam Schoales is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
