Posts Tagged ‘film’
the end of the line
This is a 60 second film I made recently for the Cinequest Phone Flick Contest sponsored by Sandisk. I made a noir Hitchcock tribute, with the San Francisco Cable Cars as one my main characters. You can watch all 20 films in the contest here and cast a yay or nay for any, all or none of them. Voting ends February 23rd and the top four films vie for a grand prize of $5k. 
The shoeshine camera was made from a shoeshine box I picked up at a garage sale for three dollars. I cut the hole for the lens with a circular drill bit then used a Dremel to carve a slot for the film holder to fit. I sanded down the box, stained it then lacquered it. After it dried in the sun, I lined the inside with some black velvet. I took a Universal 35mm, f/2.7 Tricor lens (No. 66831) from an old Universal Mercury II camera that still had a nice and smooth manual aperture, then appropriated a viewfinder from another camera and mounted it on the side of the box.
I mounted the threaded insert that the lens was screwed into in it’s camera, so I could remove the lens and take pinhole shots as well. The Trees is a pinhole shot and the exposure was about a second. I loaded two 4×5 film holders each with 2 sheets of Fuji Velvia but three of the four sheets were over-exposed. I wanted to test it out before wasting a bunch more film and I only had a box of ten sheets.
It should be duly noted that the camera maintains the functional integrity of its original intended purpose: get your shoes shined while taking a picture.
¹ Can you guess what the engineering flaw is on the viewfinder mount?
This is a raw 8mm film I shot in 1989 when I was in the circus (I played saxophone in the circus band). I had it digitized recently. I have another reel somewhere that I have yet to find.
http://www.vimeo.com/3046935
Have an analog TV? Then bring it to the funeral (I assume you own something black). This particular service will be held at the Berkeley Art Museum, Tuesday, February 17, at 7:00 PM°
They invite you to bring your Analog TV for display; they’ll be stacking the first 40 in memoriam (the remainder will be responsibly recycled). The guests/events at the ceremony include Author & Punisher performing a funeral dirge, Stanford Professor and media scholar Paul Saffo, and author Bruce Sterling who is set “to deliver the eulogy just before the analog signal winks out for the last time and the frequency wasteland is invaded by pirate TV artists. It’s rare that the entire nation gets a specific date on which one major medium dies and is replaced by another. This event will be a scholarly and artistic reflection on the passing of one of the dominant mediums and cultural influences of the late 20th century.”
Show up early and build your own pirate TV transmitters, which may get used for the funeral ceremony. Artists from Neighborhood Public Radio will teach attendees how to build small low-wattage analog TV transmitters that can accept input from computers and VCR’s.
Presented by the Long Now Foundation, Berkeley Center for New Media & Berkeley Art Museum + Pacific Film Archive.
°Congress has debated changing the official date for the switch to digital television; however the event will proceed on Feb. 17 “because we prefer to bury a fresh corpse rather than wait for the walking dead to fall over.” You can also check out the FCC’s official page on the dtv transition with all the details.
