This Sunday 27th November, Neil and I will be in Fabrica making flick sequences in and around the building and then printing them into flick books. This is an open workshop. Come with your digital camera and make some flick journeys too. We'll have the software to lay-out the images for print, scissors for you to cut out the frames and bull-dog clips to bind them with.

This Thursday I'll be introducing Flickers and talking with Kate Genevieve of Chroma Collective, Sam Peason of Me and the Machine and Ju Row Farr of Blast Theory about projects which explore cinematic navigation of urban space. 
More info here.

18:00-19:00
24.11.11

The Sallis Benney Theatre
58-67 Grand Parade
Brighton

I’ve been watching The Story of Film, An Odyssey on 4OD.

I was stuck by how Bill Forsyth, who directed ‘Gregory‘s Girl', a film I loved as a teenager, spoke about the simple feeling of realising where you are in relation to what is about you - a feeling something like being mindful,  or as the best performers are -  in the moment.  This is where the idea for Flickers came from. The act of walking and seeing and the point at which everything appears suddenly significant,  hyper-real. A feeling of being here, now, in this place.

This is how Bill puts it: 

‘I could just sit on a hill and look at a housing estate and listen to an ice-cream van - for quite a long while - and that would fill me with good feelings.


...Someone finding themselves somewhere and that moment of apprehension that you’re here and this is where you are. It’s a difficult moment to describe but it’s a moment that is very cinematic for me.’

This is the aim. This is where I want people who take the flick books for a walk to get to. Do they get there? Or only people with a certain kind of sensibility? I have had responses that range from ‘sorry, but I just don’t think I got it at all’ to ‘I feel like I’ve been playing in the woods with an invisible friend for hours’.  

It only matters if no-one gets it. 

This Sunday 13th November, Neil and I will be in Fabrica making flick sequences in and around the building and then printing them into flick books. This is an open workshop. Come with your digital camera and make some flick journeys too. We'll have the software to lay-out the images for print, scissors for you to cut out the frames and bull-dog clips to bind them with. 

To extend the experiment of flick sequences on screen, I showed a version of Flickers: Under the Water on the metahub at White Night, speeding up the slow timelapse to every second instead of three. It has been good to see the sequences up there and glowing on-screen going slow, rather than fast. Did anyone see it? There's interesting work to do - playing with the format and the projecting surface/viewing environment. Slow time-lapse feels too slow, faster timelapse jerks the eye as the flick sequences have far fewer frames per second than video. The video here is at one frame per second.

So, the show's done. It was much more fun working with more people than just myself for the presentation of it. I loved the addition of sound and reckon this is the way to go - working with a sound designer from much earlier in the process, perhaps having the sound develop alongside the images from the point at which I decide the route and taking the route, rather than the final images as a starting point.