Sketchbook Pages charting production process (plus a sketch of columbo):
'Ticket to Sydney' found footage
From the start of the project I was trawling ebay looking for interesting listings of 16mm film footage to try and inspire a project idea. I almost bought some footage from the netherlands of an unknown industrual steel plant, but then I came across Basil's music separately and changed course.
Once I discovered the story about the loss of the Kirchin Band archives, I immediately had a vision in mind involving 16mm format footage and direct animation of LPs falling into the sea. This specific vision didn't last through the various reworks, but the 16mm footage idea did. I looked for any footage i could find and strunk gold with an Australian Commonwealth Film Unit film called Ticket to Sydney, which (as far as I could see from the listing) had footage of the harbour.
Once the film arrived I recorded it using my camera and tripod to ensure a steady recording. After a few practice runs I started recording, but unfortunately the age of the leader meant that in the first few goes through the projector the heat had made it sieze up and it started to jam the mechanisms. This (and my memory card running out of storage midway through) meant that the footage I managed to get was slightly chopped up and haphazardly filmed, with zooms and readjustments and the projector turning on and off. At the time this was frustrating and I had planned to try recording again once my splicing kit arrived and I could reapair the film, however once I started assembling the film the recording quirks added visual interest and tactility, so I kept them in.
Trip to Hull
As Basil lived the majority of his life in Hull and was inspired by the noises of the docks to make his most experimental music yet, I thought that a trip over there would be a great way to get original live action footage and also to get more of a grounded perspective on Basil's life after Sydney.
About a week before the deadline, me and my dad drove over for the day and spent a few hours wandering round the whole city. The marina and the seafront were the most helpful for the footage I needed, but we also visited Hessle road and the estate where Basil and Esther lived until they died.
Pathé footage & Illustrations
In researching archival information about the Kirchin Band I stumbled across a Pathé newsreel film of the Kirchin Band that was extremely high quality. Unfortunately the licensing fee for a student film was almost £300, and so I had to come up with a workaround. Initially i thought about leaving it out altogether and just doing something else, but when I tried it out using a screenrecorded clip it worked too well to just forget about it, especially with the poignancy of it being pretty much the only recorded footage of Basil available to the public.
After talking with Eleanor and Kevin (and my Dad) I decided instead to illustrate frames from the film and use them as stills instead of the Pathé footage. This would both make use of my illustration skills which have been on the backburner since the start of 2nd year (due to doing video projects pretty much exclusively since then) and also to add another layer to the concepts I like exploring around the interaction between mediums.
I decided on using animation paper due to a conversation I had with Kevin where I decided that instead of simply using stills I would film myself putting the images onto the animation peg bar. This would create a physical interaction between myself and the medium, which adds to the already interactive nature of the direct animation I went on to make next.
Direct Animation
Using leftover film leader from the last project anda new roll of blue emulsion film leader I made around 30 seconds of direct animation. Most of the time spent on this section was used attempting to get the film splicer that I bought to work properly – it hadn't been used for years and so was completely uncalbibrated. However once I got it lined up it provided a much cleaner and more reliable join than the splicing I did by hand in authorship. The style of the animation was dictated by spur of the moment decisions as opposed to pre-planning, as I feel that in placing barriers in front of the immediate nature of direct animation much of the spontaneous charm gets lost.
2D Animations and Wacom Tablet
Using my last student loan installment and because my iPad is starting to slow down, I decided that I would invest in a longer-term solution for animating from home, as this is something I expect to do a lot of in the coming years as a freelancer/academic. Using the one year Toon Boom Harmony student subscription I got earlier this year, I created a few simple line animations to get used to the software. These were reminiscent of the animated loops I am used to making on procreate, and though the inerface of Harmony is much more complex, the actual animation workflow is much more intuitive.
In addition to these two, I also did a short piece of rotoscoped animation based on a clip of Basil playing drums from the Pathé footage – like in Saint-Pierre's 'McLaren's Negatives,' rotoscoping here is used to resurrect a lost/inaccessible piece of history. Unlike in McLaren's Negatives however I wanted the rotoscoping to be as subtle as possible and give the impression of hand-animated work becasue (given wore time) that's ideally what I would have lked to have done.
Jonny Trunk Interview
One of the most exicitng parts of this project also came very late on. After emailing Jonny Trunk initially back in April and not recieving a reply, I DM'd him on Instagram in mid May asking if I could by any chance get access to the 'Kitchen Recording' interview he conducted with Basil before he died, in late 2004/early 2005. He messaged back and told me to email him, which I did, and he gave me the dropbox link the the recordings, his only condition being that he gets to see the film when it's done, which i said i wa smore than happy to do.
Quantum
Reel to Reel
On-Screen Text
The text was created by simply filming my computer screen as I typed. I thenused this footage, sped it up, changed the contrast and levels, inverpted it and turned the blending mode to screen, creating a slightly textured effect which I think feels very grounded and (again) tactile because of the slight angle from the screen.
this is versus the version where I screen recorded the type, but the difference in framerates between the word document and the screen recording software and premiere created a strange glitching effect, but also it overall looked too clean and precise for the atmosphere I was trying to create of analogue/digital fusion.
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