This painting by Zaman Zamani inspired me to make prayer beads with skulls. His painting, Mr. Zamani explained, is a memorial to the many boys who died during the Iran-Iraq war.
According to the “Foundation for Preserving and Promoting the Values of the Sacred Defense,” an affiliate of the Iranian Armed Forces’ General Headquarters, during the eight-year war with Iraq, more than 33,000 high school students were killed, 2,853 were injured and 2,433 were taken prisoner. According to a report by human rights organization Child Soldiers International, “boys as young as nine were reportedly used in human wave attacks and to serve as mine sweepers in the war with Iraq.”
When deconstructing the analog processes developed by the pioneers of early animation, I inevitably find myself reconstructing them using digital technologies, while identifying opportunities to expand, and dare I say, improve them. With its affordance of proceduraily and repeatability, computers and computer--driven devices can make the tedious process of frame-by-frame animation less grueling.
In 1958 New Zealand Artist Len Lye used a direct-to-film technique to scratch ‘figures in motion’ onto 16mm black film leader to make Free Radicals, a 5 minute visual music set to bongo beats.
Title and Credits Sequence Isolated and Oscillating Y
He used various scribes, from dental tools to arrowheads, (and I'd bet a comb) on the very small 10.24 mm x 7.49 mm frame of Super16 film.
The surface area of Super 16 film (`92 mm²) is about 1/3 of a US penny (~285mm²).
I was in awe when I realized his crude marks were rotating in place, and seemed to be dancing in a 3D space. Maintaining volume in 2D drawings is very difficult when done by hand.
Rotating in Place and Dancing in a 3D Space
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Quote by Len Lye about the music
"I did about ten minutes worth of this stuff, collected the best bits, said "Oh, here're the best bits now," and looked at them. I realized that they were boring. I couldn't kid myself, after ten seconds they were absolutely boring to me. I had had it . . . .It was curious how I lost my involvement with the stuff after about ten seconds, but when I played both (the music and the animation) together I could stay with it for three or four minutes. I am totally involved with the sensory business about motion without any intellectual story, or anything else other than just motion."
Using scratched film implies the story is told from the perspective of birds, who document their adventure, perhaps as a warning to mankind.
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From my lightning talk for Experimental and Expanded Animation; Exploring Artistic Possibilities. Presented May 27th, 2022 via Zoom, this presentation is part of a monthly series organized by SPARKS (Short Presentations of Artworks & Research for the Kindred Spirits) for the Digital Arts Community of the ACM SIGGRAPH (Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques).