JAN 19 PUNAKAIKI > LAKE KANIERE > HAAST – N2

This proved to be an interesting day!
As per previous I left Punakaiki early-ish and stopped in Greymouth to pick up a few things, and then headed to Hokitika, got some sushi and drove in to Lake Kaniere to shoot some film.

Last two times at Lake Kaniere I found a great location – the kind of shot that could have been taken a century ago & it would not look much different. And the very last time the weather wasn’t great – drizzle & I didn’t have time to explore options, but I had previously flown my drone to do a little recce and had an idea in mind. The hard part was access…

I had to either find a way down through dense bush or climb down a sketchy gravel bank, all with my XPAN camera bag over my shoulder, my Linhof camera in a backpack & a tripod in my hand… And I had to be able to get back up again! I tried going down through bush from both directions to the view and was stumped, the non-track either ended up in a swamp or the bush was too dense to fight through… So I lowered my centre of gravity & crawled down the gravel bank…

The inlet to the lake had quite a soft bottom – it was swampy & when I took a step, my foot would sink in… I had to be super cautious as did not want to lose balance & fall over… but eventually got out into the lake a little bit where it had a reasonably stable bottom. I set up my tripod & shot some frames with the XPAN, and then swapped over to the Linhof Technorama… And I got to say: nothing makes you more present than when you are standing knee deep in a swamp, wrangling cameras! I am used to the XPAN and will happily wade into water, setup my XPAN, swap lenses, add filters etc – but all very slowly & carefully with multiple fallback safety tactics… But the big Linhof camera is a different kettle of fish, with no rangefinder or light meter built in, framing a shot is only the last step in prepping to fire a frame…

First I took readings with my light meter – a Sekonic L758DR, which lets you average multiple readings… Based on that I set my exposure on the Linhof, also accounting for 1.5 stops of centre filter on the lens.

The Pentax Spot Meter on the right I only got recently, at an auction… Its a classic 1 degree spot meter, but has also been modified by Zone VI, so the display on the side where you choose your settings based on the spot meters reading also has a Zone System display:

I am still learning to use it, so I didn’t pull it out while standing in the swamp… But next was to consider focus & depth of field. When I got the Technorama, Ian Leeden who owned it showed me a neat little rangefinder by Voightlander

It fits in the hotshoe on the Technorama and when you look through the little viewefinder on it you see a ghost image overlayed with the direct view. By tweaking the knob on the front you align the two images and that indicates distance, in feet, which I then transfer the reading to Technorama lens ie that tree branch is X feet from the focal plane of the camera.

After watching this vid on youtube I also recently got a digital laser distance meter too, so that was my backup…

So with exposure set, focus and DOF set, I framed my shot and checked the camera was aligned by the XY bubbles in the other hot shoe, I cocked the shutter and fired a few exposures…

I packed the camera back into its backpack, waded out of the lake, then swamp and crawled up the gravel bank & back to the car.. And then took off my wet shoes & socks & jeans & put them on the dashboard to dry while I ate lunch – the sushi from Hokitika was great & just what I needed!

I drove out the bottom of Lake Kaniere & thru back roads out to the main road and then carried on South, as I still had a way to go… One of the occasional frustrations of road trips in NZ is goddamn campervans. I have grown to loathe them, as it seems they tend to be driven at 80kmph or less, regardless of the terrain. Some/many such drivers do watch their rear vision mirrors & pull over to let vehicles pass but a few times I caught up with a train of them, like a moving blockade! AT one point there were six -not all campervans, but they were all travelling slowly with it seems no one able or willing to pass. We eventually got to a big open straight road with great visibility & no one coming and… they all just trundled along at the same slow speed, so I floored it & blasted past all six of them in one hit… They create such a road hazard, despite there being signs saying ‘If theres traffic behind you, pull over and let it past’ and when following drivers who don’t pull over, I tend to shout as I count all the times they could have pulled over & let others pass… & give them the finger when I do eventually pass.

Campervans are a plague on the roads & I have two strong beliefs about them. First is that I think they are a terrible way to see NZ. The only potential benefit is that tourists can ‘save money’ by committing to booking one & that covers all their accomodation, but what shitty accomodation. They all park up in campervan parks at night which are more like shopping mall carparks than ‘being in nature’ so that aspect sucks. Having committed so much of their budget to the campervan rental, it seems the tourists cook in them & explore local cuisine less, and they are pretty terrible for driving and especially parking in cities, so again the tourists avoid those… Driving them, they handle like a small truck… I love driving NZ roads, its a pleasure to cruise safely & relatively effortlessly through such incredible scenery, but slowly grinding up hills & having to always take corners slowly as the cameprvan cant handle, makes the driving experience suck. And from an economic point of view for tourism for NZ, I suspect the only people who really benefit financially are the campervan rental companies. So they get a financial return while degrading the experience for everyone else, especially locals. So if you plan on a holiday in NZ, please consider something other than a goddamn campervan…

This rant is very relevant to my planned accomodation.

I knew I wouldn’t get to Haast until 5pm or 6pm, so I booked ahead and having done a bit of research decided to camp & booked a powered site at the Haast RiverSide Motel & Campground. The website looked ok & a powered site wasn’t expensive, but when I arrived there I took one look and went OH FCK NO. The powered site was basically a gravel car park, right beside fckng campervans! I went in & asked if I could upgrade to a motel, but they were booked out, so I cancelled my booking. I was absolutely not going to pay to have a shitty experience like all the campervans I had passed, sleeping in a gravel carpark!? The ‘river-side’ part of the name was a joke, the river was quite a way off, across the main road & a 5 minute drive. So where to stay?

I filled up with petrol & left Haast, heading South towards Jackson Bay. I stopped in at another motel & they told me they were also booked out… when I mentioned camping the guy warned me: “Don’t freedom camp! The council will fidn you and fine you!” And that was all the encouragement I needed! Right then & there I vowed to freedom camp by finding s spot so remote no fckng council worker was going to find me. But I also decided I would not camp on DOC or Council land, so they didn’t have any jurisdiction over me, a private land owner would. But it also reflects a tragic aspect of regulation: there are zero camping spots between Haast & Jackson Bay. Many years ago (like 30+) me & two drinking/film buddies went on a first road trip to the West Coast & we stayed in cabins in a huge campground down below Haast somewhere… But it must be long gone & subdivided/developed into housing or something, as I have spent considerable time trying to relocate it and it simply does not exist any more!?!

So where did I camp?

I drove down towards Jackson bay & then drove way in a gravel road beside a river… I’d only been on the gravel road for 5 minutes when I saw a group of 4WDs camping, right out in the riverbed – in plain site. They were very well set up, so I knew I was on the right track, but I kept going…

I eventually turned off the gravel road & followed a 4WD track along the bank of the river and parked up… I set up my tent, cooked some BBQ for dinner & had a few drinks while I laughed about the contrast between the shitty gravel carpark ‘powered site’ and where I was now:

I was far enough away from the road that no one was going to notice me… And I soon realised my new ideal is stealth camping!! It was peaceful, falling asleep to the burble of the river. The next morning I got up & flew my drone to see how visible I was from above…

Can you see me in this shot – just look at that beautiful primordial forest!

From directly overhead my tent looked like a bad pixel block

This made me think, if I ever wanted to be ‘very stealth’ a dark coloured tent would be a better idea, or a ‘camou’ patterned tarp… And having a cover for reflective headlights & tail lights would also be useful…

But it also resolved something in me. One of the reasons I love the idea of camping in a tent is that you are basically sleeping outdoors. The walls of a tent provide no insulation against external sounds, so to pitch your tent in a forest means your ears are sleeping in a forest – you directly experience the natural sonic world from dusk, through the night & at dawn. THAT is the aim, and to camp in a campground surrounded by other campers & kids & vehicles etc is the opposite of what I desire.

So where does responsibility lie? The same place it always has: leave the place as you found it. Take you rubbish with you. Follow fire safety rules etc… But from now on my mission is going to be slowly finding stealth camping spots all over NZ. I already know of some in the Takaka Western Inlet, as was once recording there, dropping my hydrophones off a bridge and on the walk back to the car I suddenly realised someone was stealth camping near the bridge, accessed via a rough 4WD track that you would not even notice as you drove by… I also notice in a lots of 4WD trip videos on youtube, how they are always in such remote places that they camp without any issues…

But such travel requires a different level of preparedness eg in hindsight, the only reason I even booked a powered site was to recharge my drone batteries. But I had enough storage onboard (a second car battery in a battery box with outlets, plus three 18V Ryobi battries with an inverter) so I coped fine, using my laptop & recharging drone batteries, plus I have a few small USB batteries to recharge my phone (when not driving & charging it from the car). Pressurised Yakima solar shower worked great, and I have a 25 litre drinking water tank in the car which along with the little gas BBQ and 12V fridge mean dinner & drinks can be as elaborate or simple as you like…

The evolution of my 4WD camping continues…

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!?