Getting Scratchy

I am a big fan of ‘proof of concept’ ie before committing significant time & resources to an idea, test it! Try a very simple iteration and check out the work involved, and the outcome…

Saturday afternoon I opened one of the 16mm prints I scored at auction and unravelled some footage. I grabbed a pair of scissors & counted out 24 frames of a single shot, and snipped it off. I didn’t pay much attention to the material, but as luck would have it one piece was of Marilyn Monroe, and one was of Elvis!? WTF?
I then lay one of the pieces flat on a sheet of opaque glass sitting on an old lightbox I got at a junk store, and I started scratching!

First I used a fine point needle to pin prick the eyes, and then realised I was working on the wrong side – I flipped it over so the emulsion was facing up & I used a ruler to drawn a vertical line along the entire length, but starting top left and ending bottom right, such that in playback a vertical line will transit left to right… I scratched some ‘sparks’ – 2 sets of six scratches each side, trying to vaguely do them the same in each frame… Then same for a cross on her chest.

Next I got some felt pens and did some random colouring, painting her face blue etc = Splodgey Marilyn. I took the ruler & drew a line across all frames, opposite to the scratched one & in blue ink.

It’s a quick messy hack job – so I mange and limit my own expectations – don’t expect any works of genius, but that also means the FAFO instinct should be encouraged! Improvise.

Next I put the strip of film in my Epson V800 flatbed scanner & scanned it, then opened the TIFF scan file in Photoshop, lined it up, and set up some guides.

I then copied fixed-size single-frames from the strip to a new file, stacking the frames one after another, into Photoshop layers. 24 frames, 24 layers.

It was then a simple process of using Photoshops timeline functions to create a layered vid using the layers, and then check & tweak the order of frames in the timeline. And once its in order, save it (as a PSB file due to large file size) and then output a GIF file.

This is a low rez 800w 1.4MB GIF of my efforts:

What I wanted to check was whether an idea was viable. Rather than have some grand idea & try to ‘scratch’ an entire film of some kind, all I want to do is make one second loops. And see how they feel, when sync’d to music, snd etc.

So if my sequence plays at 24 frames per second, then 24 frames equals one second of visuals, which also equals one bar of audio at 120bpm.

The final step in this process was:
set the GIF looping & play some 120bpm music!

While doing the scratching etc I kept thinking about a Carl Craig song which I was sure would be 120bpm so I eventually found it, this one:

It doesn’t matter too much when you start the music, the GIF will sync.
And that amused me for a bit, but try this:

– save the GIF to your desktop
– open a new page in your web browser
– drop the GIF on it, it should start playing & looping
– in another browser window start the music playing

If you select the GIF window and hit cmd R, it will very quickly reload the GIF and restart playback from frame 1, meaning you can manually resync playback to the music. And if say you want to loop just the first six frames (ie quarter of a bar) of the GIF, you can just keep hitting cmd R in time with the kick drum of the music.

It’s kind of fun!

But its also resolved my ‘proof of concept’ as I now know I can make as many wacky one second visual loops as I like using scratch film. I will set up a template to make the extraction of single frames in Photoshop easier… And then I will start building a little library of one second loops!

The performance/real time editing idea I want to pursue is this:
using the VIDEO SYNC plugin with ableton LIVE, I can play video like its audio – quantized or not, I can trigger any clips I like… So imagine a month from now I have 60 x one second scratch film video loops.

In ableton LIVE I can also choose to use the legato mode when triggering clips, where changing clip playback from clip 1 to clip 2 won’t reset playback to frame 1 of the new clip, it will continue playback from the same frame counter. So eg I could start playback on clip 1 – it plays f1,f2,f3,f4,f5,f6 then I hit playback clip 2 legato mode, and it will play f7,f8,f9,10 etc…

There is a LOT of potential to create an interactive scratch film ‘thing’ – but that’s without considering the audio. Jamming visuals to existing music is fun but the one second scratch film video clips could also have audio embedded in them… That could be a texture, some sync percussion or noise or whatever! I also love ‘one bar techno’ jams eg some of how Kyoka is using the looper in this vid

So I’m going to start scratching film as a hobby to build up a little library so I can develop this idea… because the proof of concept is now verified.

Now wheres the green splodgey Elvis!?