Daniel Torrente
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
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Objective: As in all things there are always two sides and at the extremes of these two sides the delineation between each other falls. The same struggle that Nihila goes through, is the same struggle that the piece itself is going through. They do not want to be what they are. Nihila is a girl born without any color, fine with who and what she is, but the world around her is not. As she grows older her world of imaginary friends doesn't grow with her. She questions herself, and realizes to just fit in is worth giving up what she is for what she's not. The pieces struggle is found within the arena of film vs. video, but to even more of an equal extreme since like film the piece is shot frame by frame digitally. Since it is shot in this method it already starts to contain the first signs of classic cinema, it is silent the same as the first films. To add to this quality the framing, use of shadows and even the movement is based off films from 1902 to 1925. Some of these films are Trip to the Moon by Méliés, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Weine and Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau, But even with all of this the piece on its own is still just a digital monster remixing elements of the past, recording images as 9.4mb instead of 35mm film, making once live piano accompaniment into heavily digital masterpieces. At the extremes the delineation starts to fall. Making what was once the opposites the same. One important thing to note is this piece is intended on being seen on film, making the idea of the opening starting with color bars and tones an ironic twist on identity.
Tools used: The first time I started animating photo stills was five years ago when I found two sets of 4 pictures of my great grandfather from a photo booth. I was the only one of my family to never see him alive, and I changed this. I animated him back to life. A lot has changed since then. The process that was and is intended for this piece was to shoot everything digitally and transfer it back to film. I shot all the pictures on a Nikon D100 SLR w/ a Nikkor 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5d lens. Since I was shooting for 35mm film stock I shot at 24 frames a second with an image size comparable to a resolution of 2048x1536. While shooting I used the cameras intelligence against itself to mimic the rapid and un-constant shifts in exposure of early cinema. This was done by setting the cameras metering to spot metering so it would only be deciding the exposure from what it was focused on. Before shooting anything though the movement of the whole piece was calculated based off key framing actions in the same method of stop motion puppet animation. Thus every scene was equal to a list of numbers. In total I shot approximately 10000 pictures recording each image as a tiff file. After transferring all the files into my computer I proceeded to begin the tedious process of cleaning the images up in Adobe® Photoshop®. While shooting, the color mode of my camera was set to Adobe RGB to allow there to be the widest gamut color range and also have the best transfer into Photoshop. I cleaned the images using the heal and stamp tool where needed. But To resize, adjust and save I would rely on creating my own action and doing batch automations to work faster although this still took hours for the computer to do on its own. All of the pictures were shot in color and nothing was turned otherwise. After having all the images prepped and organized into folders I would then use Adobe After Effects® to complete the rest of the process. Having the composition set to the correct format for film I would then import the images as tiff sequences and place them into the time line. To match the narration perfectly I also had to time stretch some segments. Once all the pieces were organized and rendered I would place them all back onto the timeline, put the audio tracks down with them, and render it for the last time.
