Paint Sale

A documentary – of sorts – retinted, toned, sped up, slowed down.

Brief and bouncy document of Jennet’s open studios private view, back when she was still mostly a painter.

This was my first sustained use of open shutter time-lapse work with Super 8, a technique I’ve explored a fair amount since e.g. you can see it in Magic Explained (2019), The Riddle (ghost chair) (2014) and We Are Time (2012/13).

As this was early days experimentation, I’d slightly misjudged the exposure time, so some of the b+w footage came back fairly overexposed. Remembering how photographic film toner can make the image denser, I opted to tone sections of it blue (that dealt with the film’s thin greys and blacks) and then complemented that with a purple tint/food dye (which reacts with the lighter parts of the image).

The films we were making at this time were shown as films i.e. tape splice edited and then projected from the Super 8 footage that came back from the lab - so ‘sorting it out in post’ wasn’t an option.

The corollary was this encouraged explorations of the materiality of celluloid film which can be: scratched, hole-punched, bleached, painted, sewn into, dyed, abraded with sandpaper, engraved, adorned with transfer letters etc. and still be projectable (just so long as you don’t rupture the sprocket holes).

So, shooting on reversal film had its limitations, but also brought with it a rich range of experimental possibilities and solutions.