Project 3 is done, enjoy the creepiness.

A few weeks ago, all I knew that I wanted to do for my final project was something vaguely scary. I greatly liked some of the experimental film projects that the rest of the class had done, and wanted to create something with a similar look, but I wondered if I could create the same effect without actually drawing on film. My original idea was to shoot hundreds and hundreds of photographs of random or creepy things in black and white and then composite them together at 7-14 frames per second and see if scrolling them by at such a fast rate would produce unanticipated flashes of imagery or animation. I would then do some creepy sound design for it.

This didn't work out so well - after taking ~ 200 pictures or so for this purpose, I strung them together in an animation sequence and didn't like what I was seeing. It was pure visual chaos, the eye couldn't follow, and it just didn't look very good. At that point I started to panic because the idea I'd been pursuing for over a week was bad, and I had only a couple days left to finish the project. I eventually reverted to an earlier idea that had me creating an experimental film effect by drawing or painting each frame not on film, but on paper and then doing stop motion animation. During the process of shooting the pictures for the first idea, a friend had told me to take some pictures of a fake severed hand and severed finger that he had, since they would undoubtedly look creepy in black and white. While painting some of the early frames for the new stop motion animation, I thought of that finger that I still had around and a sick and disturbingly awesome idea emerged.

Thus, Finger-Painting was born. The materials used in this stop motion would probably be surprising. Despite the name, no paint was actually used. I used fake stage blood, a great deal of food coloring, soy sauce, and even spaghetti sauce at one point because it looked particularly like viscera under certain lighting conditions. I shot it all on a Sony Cybershot digital camera mounted on a stationary tripod. I shot the colors not only on paper, but also at one point on a metal sheet that created a particularly vibrant look.

In the end, it all came together quite nicely. I animated all of the image sequences by importing them into Adobe Aftereffects, which I also used to do the titles and to change the color and exposure of the footage. I then added the film effect and sync'ed up the audio using Sony Vegas. "The Entertainer" gives the piece it's morbid humor, and the "intense" part of the audio is done using various string samples composed in Logic.

In all, I think it looks quite a bit like experimental film without actually following the traditional method of scratching or painting on film itself. I am pleased with it.