Holy Relics

First journal of the year.

On my first day back I was tasked to do something awesome. I was asked to make some short animation by painting onto 16 Millimeter film.

This was a dream come true. Drawn on Film animation is a classic style that has made many unique short films. It was a favourite medium of the Mozart of animation, Norman Mclaren. Here’s an example of his work.

So I was hyped to get to work. I was given enough film to make 12 seconds of footage. Though I only made about five seconds.

This will be added to a short film made by the the class. Each one of us has made footage in this style and the result I’m sure will be a very interesting abstract collage. I hope to be able to upload my little piece of footage on it’s own in time.

I had great fun making it. I hope to do more in this style.

While I was doing it I found myself working with a fellow student named Dan. He was also behind on work and like me was catchin up on this project. He seems to have been battling with the same agoraphobia and anxiety That I have been dealing with for the past four years. In fact the reason why I had never met him was because like me back in 2016 his agoraphobia had stopped him from coming into class for a whole term. I give him what advice I could on dealing with it and I hope he can learn to live with it. I’ll help him if I can.

The main thing I want to talk about was what happened after I stopped animating. I was pretty tired by the half past two and want to call it quits. So Tom came in and manually cut the film and added it to the existing film footage. Genuine 20th century low-tech. It was strangely elegant in a lumbering, manual way. Certainly more exciting than computer editing. Afterwards he wound the film onto a reel.  I asked if I could hold it. It seemed strange to me that dispite having been a film fan since I was thirteen I’d never held or even seen a genuine film reel. Holding it felt strange, but nice, almost like coming home. It had a nice weight to it. It was strange to think this circle of metal and celluloid was or at least contained a work of art. And that all the great movies I loved from the past were made of several of these things. So small and unassuming. But containing great power.

But that was just the start. Tom took me and Dan to a room with an old fashioned film projector. An elegant machine virtually unchanged from the sort used a hundred years ago. Once again it was strange and exciting seeing one of these things for real for the first time. I imagine that this must be similar to how people in the middle age felt upon seeing the relics of great saints. I can see the impetus for movies like Last Action Hero and Purple Rose of Cario. This thing really does feel magical. The whiring sound and the flicking light that I had seen so often in movies but never actually experienced made me feel like I was actually in a movie myself. Tom said that he thinks classic film will never really go away. That’s like Vinyl and CDs. A I thin he might be onto something.

I love being around these holy relics of cinema. I could get used to working with them.

When the film rolled and we saw our animations play it was wonderful. I got a little too excited when I saw my little fragment on screen.  A long time ago my drawing teacher, Van Howell, asked me what I thought it felt like when you do a really good drawing. After I made my guess he told me that after doing a great drawing you want to do another one. And that’s how I’ve been feeling about the drawn on film animation. I want to do more. I think about coming in just to do it. Maybe I should. I’d never considered this could be for me. But i guess that’s why you go to uni. To have your mind expanded. And sometimes it even happens!