Nachleben Experimental Film Lab

Set up for upcoming VI / motorhand / expanded noise projector dissassembly / projector as CV and signal source / apparatus / melting-burning shows – North Europe Tour 2026!! 

email on poster if you are interested.

asylum studios / nachleben workshop

Building E2 Bentwaters Park

Rendlesham IP122TW

Suffolk, UK, europe, Earth

Quick document of rostrum/roroscope camera set up.

This adapted Oxberry camera, (presumably from an old rostrum camera) has had a new stepper motor added which is under digital programme control. It uses a Nikon F lens mount and I’m shooting lots with a Micro Nikkor Nikon F 60mm 2.8  lens. It is DUAL gauge and I have gates and sprocket drives for 16 and 35mm.

As it turn out 16mm uses an A4 punched paper and 35mm uses A3. In the days of rostrum film animation things were done in field sizes so Im currently working out the best way to achieve best setup for main field sizes in these formats. The barcode picture is for value 0 which will expose into the soundtrack area on 16mm and I’m trying to make some optical sound experiments using this way of generating sound from mumbers.

Chromacolour field sizes (https://www.chromacolour.co.uk/animation-supplies/dope-sheets-field-guides.html)

The artwork area can be lit with LED lights or two Arri 2K floods depending on what film you use or want to do. If other lenses are put on and the camera is moved back a large area becomes available to shoot.

The motor is very programmable, driven by a CL57T, run from an Arduino UNO.

You can shoot single frames and  multiple frames by assigning a number to the button. You can enter a number manually to shoot. It opens to H mode or ‘half’ so you can rotoscope a piece of film in the gate, infact you must do this to focus. You can also have set time B mode for long exposures. It records frame numbers accurately and goes forwards and backwards. The speed is adjustable but I tend to run quick wedge test with light metered for the stock and see which F stop looks best. ((MUST ADD EMERGENCY STOP!!))

All in All I am super happy with this build, it is a very versatile tool for making images, esp from flat artwork and I cant wait to shoot some 3D stuff I have been collecting from around the wild areas where I live.

(still editing and formatting this post/page)

Early on in the formation of the DIY film lab scene there was a meeting in Hamburg or possibly Hannover (sector 16) or  somewhere else where I saw mentioned the idea of converting steenbecks or other flat bed edting tables into contact printers. Esther also mentioned this at WORM and a howto appears in their DIY booklet. So I have always wanted to do this and now I have and it works very, very well I dont feel the need to get a contact printer. Also as it doubles up the use of one machine into two, its very economical.

The main thing is that everything is there to allow this BUT somekind of device or part needs to be built that creates a small slit which the light passes through as films which are bi-packed travel pass. We know from how ‘proper’ contact printers are designed that this slit is crucial in producing a ‘blade’ of light that exposes the film. A wider more diffuse beam will cover too big an area and contain variations within it which will make for a messy transfer.

Here is a fullish documentation of the steenbeck contact print mod that I have been using.

This adaption of a steenbeck is completely non-destructive and the machine can happily be returned to its normal function in a matter of seconds.

To carry out this adaption you will need the following:

1. Somekind of camera/printer magazine to house the RAW stock and allow it to feed out smoothly. I am using a Mitchell style magazine which is clamped onto the left side of the machine with enough packing to make it the same level as film normally loaded onto the viewer. This magazine could just be a light proof box, pizza box, anything that protects the film from the light which is useful for lacing up.

2. A slit / gate type thing. You could try printing without this, but the bulb in a steenbeck is bright enough to totally over-expose the film (for eg Kodak 3303 or ORWO PF2) and you will need someway of placing ND filters in the light path. More on the slit later.

3. Usual stuff to put exposed film into bag/tin to take to darkroom.

4. Some thick foam, blackout material.

The first things to do are block any light leaks. I use a black casement material but cinefoil or thick card will do. Turn the machine on in the pitch black and look out for leaks. With the viewer light on a very obvious leak is the screen itself. Make up a piece of foam (from camera case) that fits tightly inside the viewing hood. In my experience so far the red power button does not fog the film

Next, the magazine is seen here clamped in position. It can be loaded with 400ft of RAW stock and left in this postion all the time as it does not interfere with normal operation. That clamp is useful for other things so will make a bracket for this at some point.

You can perform these steps in room light and only the section of RAW stock you handle will be fogged. You first lace the RAW stock into the steenbeck head making sure to purchase the sprockets. You can wind a bit forwards onto a T-core or spool. You could also do this with red safe light on to save film but it can be a bit tricky to get both the films into the gate area.

Then you lace up the negative or material you are printing using the lower platter seen above as green leader. Re-open the gate guide rollers and slide the neg INFRONT making sure to feel the teeth purchase on both films. I always wind a bit forwards here as the noise it makes is a good indicator of correct lacing.

The usual convention for contact printing is emulsion to emulsion. However, the neg or OG (original) film you are copying is actually TAIL OUT in this set-up as it is impossible to load it HEAD OUT with emulsion facing away and sprockets DOWN (steenbeck convention).

Now both films are laced you can place the gate/slit into its position. A close up of the gate shows that mine has been made to fit exactly the profile of the mount that holds the prism. People will have to explore their own ways of doing this. 3D printing perhaps

My 1st slit (green) was right next to the prism, seen here built from 2 metal curtains which are machine screwed tight to the holder. This idea was the thought that different slit widths could be tried. But as this slit is too far away it creates dispersed shadows either side of a brighter slit. No good. Adding another slit (yellow) only about 10mm was done by adding 2 rectangular metal bars seen here glued onto the curtains.

What you want to achieve is a slit about 1mm wide, as absolutely parallel as you can, that is as near to the film plane as possible but with enough room to be able to tape ND gel onto the front. 3D printing might work, etc. The quality of a contact print depends on the nature of the OG and you will almost surely need to make several tests until you get the ND value right.

When gate/slit is in place I cover the whole gate area with another black cloth just for superstitious reasons. Then you can enter darkroom state with safety light of correct type for the RAW film you are using. You can run steenbeck forwards now and when ready turn on the lamp button on controls which I have marked with tape so as not to hit the sound amp/exciter power which for some reason on my steenbeck is before the viewer light??? As the machine runs you can see light emanating slightly from the left of the gate, when ready you switch the light off and let it run a bit to leave a bit of leader.

Now the scissors you have hanging around your neck or by the machine can be employed to cut the film, I cut over by magazine and run last bit of film off. Then load into bag/tin and take to the processing department for develpment.

If I had a quid for every time the gate/slit device was accidentally knocked onto the floor I’d have about 5 quid now. So I made a little padded box to preserve its special and fragile nature.

NOTES.

LOOPS.

An obvious thing you can try is making up LOOPS which will print over and over again. This will put your splicing skills to the test.

MASKS.

You can make masks out of black tape and place across the slit so for instance printing onto the image area only and holding out the soundtrack area. Then rewinding the film, loading a soung neg, reversing the mask and printing to the sound track area.

RESULTS.

The results are extremely good I’d say. A KEY factor is the accuracy of the parallel-ness of the slit. If the slit is for instance tapered, which you could do on purpose, then the exposure will not be even across the frame. Tiny imperfections in the edges of the slit and thus the parallel will show up. In copies so far for instance I can detect no difference between an original soundtrack and a new copy made this way. IMHO so far a slit of 1mm with no ND way overexposes the film. This is good, you might want to do this. Well exposed 3378 currently prints at ND4, and well exposed 7222  around ND1.5. But with a 1mm slit, which is easy to set with feeler gauge or such thing, you have plenty of headroom to stop down with ND gel. Its great, it works, DO IT YOURSELFS. Happy to answer questions or help you make your own conversion.

One more thing, as it is operated sitting down as you do when editing, its really easy and fun to work. I do things like count to 90 to get 50ft lengths for my lomos. A digital footage counter would be nice!! I’d even go so far to say I enjoy this printing more than optical printing which is like plate spinning 13 antique ming vases whilst balancing on a football with one eye shut and wearing a rucksack filled with 9 kittens whilst simultaneously brushing your teeth and typing the complete works of shakespeare with a mechanical typewriter that is strapped to a goat that is dancing on a hot plate with a firework tied to its body which have the fuses lit and are about to go off!

Heres a bad illustration of the optics that you have to think about to get as fine and sharp a slit as you can. Also, the double band of light is a function of how close the slit is to the film plane. This area on most steenbecks is about XXXX. So my adaptation is based on the fact that the metal holder and curtain arrangement was made before learning about the problems with shadows. So design something that gets close to the film plane but still allows ND gel to be taped infront and/or black tape. Experiment with a ‘corridoor’ rather than a slit/s as this is the same thing.

OTHER FACTORS.

This method uses the steenbeck lamp and optics. They shine up from underneath, bounce off a small front surface mirror, pass through a 45 degree prism, pass through the film, then a multi-facet ground rotating prism, then a lens, then more and more mirrors until finally arriving at the screen. Crazy, like a metaphor for lifes journey! Of course as a contact printer the light is STOPPED at the film plane so the only factors in play are the lamp adjustment and the cleaniness and postion of the prism and mirror. The prism is easy to get to to clean but the mirror sits in a tube and is held in place by a spring. It can come out of position as you try and clean it and is a bit tricky to get back into what feels like a correct position.

Motor speed. I’ve had some speed playback issues with this machine. Sometimes its wow and flutter are dreadful. Ive got some spare cards from Lew (thanks Lew and Matt Davies). I’ve looked into the sync-comparator circuits and given up trying to understand. Then the next day it will play fine. Does this tiny variation in speed effect the exposure on a contact print? I guess we can look out for a kind of ‘flickering’ across frames and match it to this error. I guess it is like anyone and has good and bad days.

TO DO.

Devise some way to synchronise sound and picture. As neg and raw are locked together in the gate this could be a case of marking the RAW from a sync mark on the neg, then after rewinding and making the necessary 26 frame drift or whatever it is, placing a sound neg ‘1khz POP’ in the right place.

Happy with adjustments on getting even spread of light for 35mm, which maybe because of its size really shows hotspots and darker spots in 1:1 printing. With 16mm you dont need the diffuser. btw you get high quality diffuser sheets with minimal ND value inside flat screens, pc monitors. Take them apart and get the diffuser out, good stuff!

The diagram shows where the diffuser filter is best placed, nearest to the condensor element which itself must be adjusted fwds-bwkds to produce a light spread that covers the diffuser best. The lamp also can be adjusted left and right to centre which can be done by eye.

The comparison of before and after is staggering. The after is obviously the one on the bottom where eveness of light exposure is really apparent.

Heres the projector/looper monitor project Ive been working on for a while now.

The mount holding the sensor has been taped onto the side of the projector to test the system. In a real world scenario you would mount this more robustly by your chosen method.

The system works like this. The safety box wires into the mains supply. Then the projector plugs into the box via the faceplate you can see below.

Via a RJ45 plug and CAT6 cable with sensor mounted on the end (which I solder/test and make) you connect the sensor to the projector so it is near (within 4mm) of a piece of card or other material that is light coloured. A piece of folded black card with a white bottom side will do. This can be seen in the video spinning underneath. This card itself needs to protrude down 25mm from the platter so a signal difference can be measured from the platter and the card surface.

The system also works if measuring the flywheel as in this picture, perhaps for a display where there is no conventional looper or a hung or otherwise managed length of film. Here a length of white LX tape has been put on the outside rim of the flywheel, about half the circumference should do.

The CODE on the arduino, which is what the whole thing is built on, measures a difference between the light and dark (darker) surface and is instructed to do nothing if there are regular changes. BUT if there are no longer any regular changes it fires a relay which is in the box which disconnects the mains. The arduino draws its power from the faceplate USB socket so it also goes off. The green button connects a PP3 battery to  boot the arduino  which fires the relay ON at start so the system restarts.

There are several parameters in the code which you can change or tweak to balance the system. One is the WINDOW of measuring, in this case this small looper has a rotation of about 3 seconds so you want at least a 5 or 6 second window. You could add more cardboard sensor triggers for instance, on a larger 40 minute looper, it doesnt matter. The others are things like a delay at the start after the relay switches ON, and before measuring/comparing, so that you can get a looper or projecor running. You could even add a global delay or timer that is set for 8 hours after first power up so in a gallery with set hours it would switch off by itself at closing time. Arduino (and other such things) are bloody great devices and easy to learn. BIG shout out to Matt McWilliams for some early coding and Mathew B at Tate Time Based Media conservation department for field testing.

Soon as I have finished some other things here in Rendlesham towers I’m going to get straight onto digitising the controls of the optical printer.

To do this I’ve broken down the functions, basic electrical control functions to 4 PAIRS.

This means there are 2 pairs of wires for the projector and 2 pairs for the camera.

Heres the first version of the logic.

You can read the pairs on the left. The 1st pair is the switch used to trigger tje projector to load a new frame. This can be a momentary push button or a latching RUN button.

When it gets pressed it sets off a chain reaction, it effectively injects 120v into a relay, this engages a mechanical clutch, this rotates a shaft, this drives the printer mechanism to move 1 new frame in plus toother wheels, etc somewhere in there a micro-switch gets triggered which can be used to make a counter add a number and if its connected to the camera it acts as the PRIMARY device and a new frame will be fired on the camera. If this button is latched to RUN the whole thing will keep moving and you will get a 1 : 1 copy sequence going.

The 2nd pair is the projector count micro-switch.

The 3rd switch pair is the camera trigger. This can also be single frame or RUN. It produces the contact in the last pair for the camera count.

Now, if 2 is connected to 3 we get the sync as described above.

Now heres version 2.

The same thing but with a bit of colour coding. Green for button controls and magenta for SECONDARY, controlled actions.

What is needed, to enhance counting and frame sequence creativity is something like an Arduino or Rpi to do all the counting and maths or rhythms or programming.

So, to help visualise this I’ve divided the switch pairs into PROJECTOR and CAMERA which stand lef tto right like they do on the actual machine. Its really clear from this now that what we need first is another sync mode where the CAMERA is PRIMARY and the PROJECTOR is SECONDARY.

Because the projector trigger button has 120v across it, I need to add a relay so that this pair can be fired from a digital device like Arduino. Once that is done there can be 2 sync modes.

I’ve been doing a lot of coding for the arduino control of the camera Im calling OX2.

I was considering porting the whole thing over to a RPi so that I could have a keyboard and screen etc to allow more functions based on prompts etc. But seeing as all I need is a X230/IBM or something smaller even, its possible to imagine using this system with the serial monitor?

Instead of writing code and building all the hardware to offer all the functions I’m just using the arduino in PC-usb connected mode and using the serial monitor to do the operation.

After quite a few rewritings Ive landed on a nice set up that offers the following:

1. Single frame always on button.

2. F for forwards and R for reverse camera direction.

3. Select 16 or 35mm, used to instruct footage counter which differs between the guages, ie 40 and 16 frames respectively.

4. Input nunber of frames. Ie, 1 = 1 frame, 24 = 24 frames.

5. B setting, asks for time open in seconds, ie 20 = 20 seconds.

6. H function opens shutter 180 degrees, effectively going into ROTOSCOPE mode. This is very useful for setting up camera-projection.

7. Counters for ‘session’, or lifetime (magazine footage). With resets on both.

TO DO:

8. Speed of steps monitor. The effective shutter speed is best measured ITRW. This is because the maths doesnt really add up. You need to high speed video the mech running in rotoscope mode, and measure the frames in an edit programme. I use Vegas. If the POT input (which controls speed) is mapped to ACTUAL shutter speeds we can use this for displaying shutter speeds in the future.

9. Micro step mode. This is useful if there develop problems with shutter sync. This can and has happened. Despite the motor being closed loop, it doesnt actually have an exact position sensor. You could add one, but the drive is built tightly into mounting hardware and the shaft is not accessible.

10. Getting Arduino to pulse out frame counters for big red LED displays. Note to self, the memory counter can only be volt free, ie fired from a relay.

11. Emergency STOP function if you type in too many frames. This could also go on the big red stop button on the controller.

12. Trigger motion-control job/event. I know I will get around to this, but if we employ simple (and inexpensive) CNC X & Y moving stages for movement of objects we have basically a Go-Motion rig.

13. Time Lapse. This will be easy enough, but be better employed if the whole rig is portable, ie to take outside, and need to build the 36v psu for this and work out way to power TUPS.

14. More a question. Has stepper micro setting been fully explored? Is 1600 per rotation absolutely the best setting?

I’ve been playing with Matts (https://sixteenmillimeter.com) brilliant Processing sketch for optical sound wave forms using chatGPT to do all the code rewriting I cant do. An amazingly pleasurable experience which as well as leaving me elated also made me consider the ethical dimension to this?

Heres the sketch. You must move the wav file to the data folder in the sketch folder for this to work.

PROC01

This work is part of ongoing research into the optical sound track, its graphical properties, methods, techniques, technologies and history.

The video above shows each 1/24th of  a second as a frame of film in a 24p video. But we know that the solar cell/reader doesnt see it this way. These exported frames are a means of studying the kinds of shapes different sounds make ‘within’ the optical sound variable area technique (Matt has done V density, multihump, dual, uni-lateral, the lot).

So the sound comes first, I am working in sound, audio, recordings first and want to see how different sounds form different waves. The discrete output of frames to rephotograph onto filmstrips to make reproducible sound from film projectors is a by product of this process. If you did make Sts this way you end up with frame lines which produce a horrible 24hz buzz. You could machine down the corner of the super 16mm gate to connect the frames but we are in microns here, in an awkward area. Besides, there are thousands and thousands of frames. An exposed ST done on a proper sound camera like the one at WORM is effectively ONE picture. Yes. The optical sound strip down the side of a movie is ONE picture. Its one long exposure, like a ‘Bulb’ shot.

The purpose of the breakdown is to study the graphical properties of sound within the method of variable area optical recording.

Once a thourough study has been made, the next step is to devise experimental graphical forms, where THE GRAPHIC FORM comes first, ie its unknown (to a degree) what the sound will be like.

35mm film can have two different waveforms next to each other producing stereo, then later via matrix encoding, surround sound. This hasnt been implemented in Matts code, perhaps we can set chatGPT this task. Via the matrix decoding process

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_decoder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_decoder#Dolby_Stereo_and_Dolby_Surround_(matrix)_4:2: )

you can get L, C, R and mono Surround from 2 channels. With the bass crossed-over (filltered, not out but off) at 150hz into an FX channel you get your 4:1 dolby surround, the .1 being the bass, 1/10th part of the full audio spectrum. 5:1 just adds another surround channel, effectively making it SL and SR.

Above is a frame from a variable area sound output of pink noise. Even in a long video clip of this we get a random effect, where the image never seems to be the same. We could programme Processing to generate lines with different weights, thicknesses, spacings, densities from input like atmospheric or environmental and then photograph them on the ST area to see what they sound like. I recommend reading about pink noise on wiki, cos its totally amazing, weird and mysterious. It seems that everything is pink noise, music, brains, the universe, god!

Loads of undocumented activity gallery type thing to make me feel better about what I am doing.

Dear Walter Murch……

I have been thinking recently about the, perhaps deeper and more long term meaning of Nachleben, prompted by reading your new book and seeing the error in your calculation about how much time during an analogue film presentation you spend in darkness.

You say, with justified confidence (page 29 – 30) that “For a 2 hour film, you spend 1 hour in darkness“. (Suddenly Something Clicked , Faber 2025).

Now its easy to see the mis-calculation. You have looked at a film projector blade and seen 3 openings and closings. You  then thought, well each frame is projected 3 times, so 3 x 24 = 72. This is partially right. There is a basic image frequency flicker of 72hz on a 3 bladed shutter BUT, and for me this BUT is a BIG BUT, you have made the incorrect assumption that those shutter blade sections are equal when infact they are not. They will almost certainly have a proportion in terms of light and dark of 3:2.

No I am entirely happy to be wrong. Perhaps all cinema blades are made unequal. Perhaps you could show me the projector type and make, photograph the shutter for me and we can measure it. Better still, lace up some 35mm and film the screen with  a decent hi-speed video camera. Then in an edit programme, count the blacks and the images. I bet $100 the ratio will be 3:2? (BTW, have you tried this with a DCP projected, uuugggh! Its ugly, not what you think it will be).

This is a minor detail. I mean, in a 2 hour film you spend either 1 hour in darkness or 48 minutes! Who cares? In a totally honest way, it only matter to me because of one very critical issue. That is what Nachleben is, after all, an attempt at investigating, the AFTERLIFE of film and how and in what ways in SURVIVES, and in this case “what even was it in the first place?”

Its a shame because your book, if full of insightful glimpses into science and related technical fields to cinema such as the ross Cache, should be held to as high a standard of empircal accuracy than any other form of scientific research? It feels a shame you couldnt find my research as all the calculations as we read them on page 103, where the error of equal light/dark shutter openings is repeated might be wrong, or better, slightly inaccurate.

You even mention in a foot note somewhere that theres no reason why the dark phase of a cinema projector shutter couldn’t be incorporated into a digital or digitised film. Well, you might find if you tried this operation that equal light and dark openings modulating at a fixed rate like 48 or 72 hz would produce image sequences that would not match mechanical ones. This is what lead me to the realisation that the base count is 5. As you could read in other posts, this count is based on solid empirical study of cinema projector blades/shutters. There needs to be 5 frames for every 24th of a second which means the frame rate, to achive a standard 24fps needs to be 120fps!! Only recent SMPTE DCP standards do support 120fps, so maybe I should make a flickering DCP and see if anyone can screen it.

This is calculated like this. Each 24th of a second digital file needs 3 pictures and 2 blacks. The pictures are up on screen 60% of the time, the dark is up 40% of the time. The whole thing, all 5 frames needs to change 24 times a second. 24 x 5 = 120.

Cinema and ratios have a rich history. We would stand to be corrected if we said we shot a film in 1.84:1. We would be wrong is we said academy was 1.35:1. Ratios define the cinema frame, composition, historic development and technical standardisation. I’m just saying ratios define what is pleasing, what works, what provides the best light/dark balance.

My argument, that analogue cinema follows a human centric paradigm is nicely supported by a 3:2 ratio. Read this AI response for instance to the question; Cultural significance of 3:2 ratio?

The ratio 3:2, while seemingly simple, holds cultural significance in various fields, including music, visual arts, and architecture. It’s closely associated with the concept of a perfect fifth in music, as well as the Golden Ratio, which is considered to have aesthetic value in art and design. The 3:2 ratio also finds application in photography and printing, particularly in aspect ratios.

Music. Perfect Fifth: The 3:2 ratio represents the interval of a perfect fifth in music. This is a fundamental musical interval that is considered consonant and harmonious.
Hemiola: In early music theory, the perfect fifth was also known as a hemiola, indicating the relationship between the frequencies of two notes.
Just Intonation: When strings are tuned to the exact 3:2 ratio, the resulting sound is smooth and consonant.

Visual Arts and Architecture: Golden Ratio Approximation.

While the Golden Ratio (approximately 1.618) is different from 3:2, it is often seen as a harmonious proportion and is sometimes approximated by the 3:2 ratio in art and architecture.
Aesthetic Value: The Golden Ratio and its approximations have been used by artists and architects throughout history to create visually pleasing and harmonious compositions.

Classical Architecture: Examples of architecture utilizing proportions related to the Golden Ratio include the Parthenon and the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Photography and Printing: 3:2 Aspect Ratio: The 3:2 ratio is a common aspect ratio in photography, particularly for 35mm film and digital images, as well as for print sizes like 6″ x 4″. This ratio is widely used for printing photographs, ensuring a natural-looking aspect ratio.

In essence, the 3:2 ratio, while not as prominent as the Golden Ratio, still carries cultural weight in various domains, particularly in music and aesthetics. It’s a simple ratio with complex cultural implications, reflecting human understanding and appreciation of harmony and balance.

So, this ratio has been with us for a long time. Im not saying someone said lets put a 3:2 ratio of light and dark into film projection shutters because it gives film or cinema a cultural weight. Rather Im saying we arrive at these proportions when we are in tune or in balance with ourselves, with nature. Nature here being our perception, our comfort, what feels right.

And we can see, in early cinema shutters and how they developed over time, that there was destined to be a final point where the amount of light hitting the screen HAD to be tempered by A) the mechanical necessity to pull down the frame, which itself had to be masked, and B) any flickering produced by this interaction. At some point, someone, somewhere arrived at a good balance point. Around 48hz picture flicker rate, with light dark in a 3:2 ratio.

(NB, its funny you mention 3 bladed shutter as in my experince these are quite uncommon).

The digital erasure of the mechanical properties of analogue projection is what started me on the path that lead to the truth of light/dark ratios in cinema shutters. To recap, any digital moving image of born film material will erase, or write out, or ignore, or prosaically destroy, the effect that mechanical delivery will create. So, if we want digital to recreate, or preserve or conserve, or mimic this effect how many frames of black are there compared to how many frames of image?

Read all about it here, if you got any spare time. I think you might be impressed by the 1/1200ths of second fade in/out that the slicing action of the shutter produces.

The Ghosts of Analogue in Digital

Further research

“Effect of Gate and Shutter Characteristics on Screen Image Quality”, Willy Borberg, SMPTE Journal, October 1957, Volume 66, pages 623-627 (from FILM-TECH list, yet to find this online)

https://academic.oup.com/edinburgh-scholarship-online/book/22094  could be interesting but currently lingering behind academic fortress.

Lewis Heriz in an Artist / Film Maker / Animator whose work can be seen here https://lewisheriz.com/

Commonly 35mm leaders have various frames that lend themselves for use as reference images during optical printer alignment. An example is this colour by deluxe graphic where the circle is a handy shape to see macro degree as well as left and right shift, etc.

Its worth mentioning that the pins in the camera gate can only acccomodate 35mm, but, once 1:1 macro is set up, then it doesnt matter what gates go in afterwards as it will still be 1:1.

Counters are an important control tool on an optical printer because you might want to flash a tiny spark into frame 39 or run a double exposure for frames 1138 – 2025 only. Or just keep track of how much footage you have printed.

After quite a bit of trial and error (as always) I’ve landed on a certain type of digital counter that has various features. It needs to count up and down obvs, but also needs to hold the number in memory so you always know where you are with long sections of film. With its additional relay its possible to get functions to stop at set numbers, useful perhaps for the future. One issue with these models is that the trigger control inputs are 0vdc, or ‘dry’ meaning they cant accept signal pulses form an Arduino (until I learn how to to do this). They can only accept ‘close-over’ connections that you find on micro and reed switches. The OX2 camera I’ve built uses an Arduino to control the motor so I can get around the 0vdc issue by triggering a 5vdc Relay that does the closing over.

To save me cutting a badly done slot into the lid I’ve gone for the clear lid enclosure style which I have to say I am very happy with even though it ended up being more difficult.

The switch above the counter will have a label saying FORWARDS to the right of the switch and REVERSE on the left. If I knew more about electronic systems I might not do it this way but basically the counter ‘doesn’t know’ which direction the projector or camera is running in even though there maybe somekind of circuit that does. So, you MUST tell the counter which direction you are going. This isnt a problem however because you already have at least half a dozen switches to keep track of when printing, why not add a few more.

Theres also the reset button still to do. This zeros the counter when you have laced up a reference frame. Perhaps drilling a few holes in the enclosure case is a good idea as the transformers do get a little warm.

The old CAMERA counter which works but has no memory can be used for someting else. I am going to use the clear lid style for all the counters now.

CEBEK

TABLE WITH PRINTING TIMES FOR 16MM.

This is for the optical printer, speeds are set manually on the machine

Here is some more Information for anyone who might be considering the 1 day optical printing workshops that I am running.

These day workshops are aimed at anyone who wants to have some hands on experience with an optical printer. We will be doing a variety of activities including viewing and selecting material on a manual examination table as well as 16mm and 35mm steenbecks, loading and exploring the printer and its geometry, making exposures to film, processing film and then further viewing and examination of results.

Because this machine and its processes are slow and methodical places on these sessions will be limited to about 4 people. This does depend however on what people want or expect so if there are folks with simple tasks in mind or are coming out of curiosity mixed with people with exact operations in mind then I might be able to accomodate more or less in each different mix of attendees.

This course is meant to introduce participants to the basic functions, possibilties and uses of an optical printer. The printer here is an Oxberry/Neilson-Hordell hybrid and there are 35mm, super 16 and standard 16mm gates. Because of the cost we will be printing TO 16mm b/w positive stock, either ORWO PF2 or Kodak 3303. Both of these stocks are developed in a D97 process which is easy and we will be doing these here. In future courses we could start printing to Kodak 3383 which requiress a more involved developing process ECP.

We will be printing TO 16mm and we are able to watch results on flat editing tables or projectors but the material that is being printed, or re-photographed, or duplicated can be either 16mm or 35mm. We could even re-photograph 35mm slides or b/w still negatives.

For these courses I am preparing a range of different material that participants can choose from. This is so that we can try different things and experiment and these are good ways to learn about the machine and its functions. For anyone who wants to attend I will send digital samples of the material before so you can prepare some ideas.

Of course if you already work with 16mm and have some material to use then this is also possible. Planning  is a key stage in thinking through what an optical printer is used for. As they basically run 1 frame at a time they are like animation devices. My machine will run at 4 frames per second but there are reasons why I don’t like doing this. So we are not going to be producing long runnning times of film on these days. Also, as we are processing ourselves too, some dark room, hand developing skills will be required but if you are new to this then thats fine as it can be taught as well.

So, email me on lab at nachleben dot org dot uk if you are interested. If the dates of 15th Feb or 1st March are not suitable I can run these days at anytime.

7 rules:

1st Rule. The camera has a very restricted view.

2nd Rule. Everything that goes in the gate (projector gate) has already been photographed.

3rd Rule. All film stock Blackens when hit by light.

4th Rule. The printer is like an animation or stop motion camera.

5th Rule. Geometry of the picture can also be modified.

6th Rule. It’s wise to use a cribb-check list.

7th Rule. A negative/positive system must be thought about in the right way.

Some further notes or rules I have sketched out below. Please read through these as they may plant ideas and questions in your mind to explore when you come.

An optical printer is basically a type of specialised camera.

1st Rule. The camera has a very restricted view, infact a feature of its view is that it’s limited to the view of another piece of film, or an area that’s the size of another piece of film. However this can be altered by changing the lens/camera position and the lens itself and thus the field of view. My set up can cater for all kinds of lenses from
specialist copy lenses to Nikon F lenses to other types of lenses.

If a lens is of a wide enough focal length then parts of the machine become visible. And if the camera and lens are moved away from the subject enough then an area approx A5 becomes photographable.

The lens part of the camera moves seperately from the camera, usually on bellows, so essentially the system is a MACRO-PHOTOGRAPHIC set up. The projector part of the machine effectively projects the image into the gate of the camera.

When it is configured as a 1 to 1 copy, ie the height of the frame being copied is replicated in the camera, ie the subject is the SAME SIZE as the image then this 1 to 1 config is the beginning of true macrophotography. Macro photography actually make things bigger, it creates a bigger projection. In normal photography we are ALWAYS making the subject smaller, ie a person or mountain becomes the size of postage stamp.

2nd Rule. Everything that goes in the gate (projector gate) has already been photographed, or made, or processed or all 3. So thinking through what you are preparing or pre making is key in planning what you print. Elements in the gate can be changed but then print to the same continuous piece of film in the camera, a kind of crude editing but they can also be exposed over the same piece of film by rewinding the camera stock to an exact position, changing the target film and re exposing. This starts to resemble the compositing process  and we will be looking at this in future advanced courses.

Its important to remember that the printer can make negatives or positives. It all depends on your overall workflow. It could just make a positive from a cut or series of negatives. It could make an internegative from a cut or series of negatives (this stock is only available on 35mm however, Kodak 2234). It could produce ‘elements’ like mattes by copying neg mattes to make their opposite. etc, etc.

3rd Rule. All film stock Blackens when hit by light. So following this rule when we RE-film a negative we will get a positive NO MATTER what kind of stock is our raw stock. But there are differences between negative stock and positive stock. One obvious difference is that negative stock by way of its use in a shooting camera has an exact ISO value. Positive stock however has no real published ISO value, if it did it would be very low, something like 4 or 5 ISO.

This is because the printer has a light built in that is bright. Infact it is usually too bright
and we use ND filters to bring it into exposure correction range. So when printing to positive
stock 2 things are important. 1 a wedge test on target photographed material , 2 ref to the
process times as a longer dev results in steeper gamma curves, ie more or less contrast  (CI
contrast index) which might be factors in the look we are striving to achieve.

Coming back to printing negative material onto negative film. Kodak 7222 for example has an ISO value of 200T, so to get a correct exposure we will need a lot of high value ND filters.  Now
negative film is also slightly more fragile and scratch sensitive whereas positive stock is
meant to run through a projector so naturally if we want a legible b/w positive made from negatives that we have shot then we print to a positive stock like PF2 or 3303. The lamp is typically run at 90 on the dial. As its a tungsten lamp, it’s optimal , white light output is achieved at this setting. If the lamp is turned down (for eg instead of using ND filters) the colour spectrum changes significantly which becomes a problem for colour film especially.

Well, I say ‘problem’ but Artists use materials and tools at their disposal differently from the idea of ‘Normal’ or ‘Correct’. So you could exploit this colour spectrum change in creative ways.

4th Rule. The printer is like an animation or stop motion camera. It only takes 1 frame of film at a time. It cannot run at sound or silent live action speeds like 24, 18 or 12 fps. It can
take a picture manually when you hit a button OR it can automatically take pictures in sync mode when a specific switch is thrown. In this mode (on my machine currently) each frame in the gate will get photographed once by the camera continuously.

1 to 1 shooting will result in a basic copy of the original albeit in a different, ie positive
format (if we have loaded positive film stock) and if the geometry is set up a certain way.

5th Rule. Geometry of the picture can also be modified by virtue of the fact that the lens is movable. It can move fwd/bkd which will effect focus. It can also shift up and down and side to side. These lateral movements have the effect of shifting the image, like
shifting the subject, whilst the camera remains fixed. These movements can be employed when doing something like composting smaller images within the frame, ie a twin screen 16mm, side by side composite which is a format often employed by the avant garde.

6th Rule. It’s wise to use a cribb-check list so multiple things can be set right before
shooting. It’s also a good idea to make an exact plan on what you are doing, including detailed
outlines of settings and sequences. This is because when the film is exposed and you are looking at it on a steenbeck you need to know exactly what the settings were on any part of the film. This is especially crucial for early wedge and ramp tests where the point of the test is to zone in on the look or image aesthetic that you want. Once you have ascertained the settings you can run a longer sequence.

For example heres the check list I use.

PRINTING CHECK LIST

A. Raw stock, laced, checked. 90 frames clear. ZERO on counter

B. Target film laced, perforation/splice damage check. ZERO on counter

C. Further Target material prepared….

1. Focussed / Aligned / Framed

2. Rack over

3. Take Ups check

4. Lens F stop

5. ND check / plan

6. Lamp at 90 / room light check

7. Camera speed / direction check

8. Camera shutter check

9. Counters set (note camera frame value)

10. Projector direction / speed / mode

11. Sequence plan

during shooting

12. Camera take up correct

13. Camera digital / mechanical counter match

14. Projector digital / mechanical counter match

15. Is the kettle on for tea, etc

7th Rule. A negative/positive system must be thought about in the right way.

A negative, whether its from the camera (OCN), or an internegative (IN, duplicate of an IP) transforms into a positive, legible, readable image when it is either contact or optically printed.

Making ‘prints’ from negatives is a ‘PHOTOGRAPHIC EVENT’ in its own right, the completion of the abstract phase of making photographic negatives. I argue for the conservation of this event as central to the survival of film arts. Scanning a negative and mathematically inverting it is not equivalent in any way to the photochemical event of printing. I can think of a few feature films released in cinemas that were shot on 16mm and scanned to a high resolution, digitally inverted, graded, etc. To me, they look extremely flat, planar, like something with infinite shallowness, ie no depth or physical properties, the residue of these forms like water marks, scratches, surface artifacts are all over-amplified by the digital sensor and thus rendered incompatible with the promises set out in the first place by analogue. If its a DCP, then its even worse as there is no flicker.

Think of it as rendering. If you cut up a load of OCN into a sequence you like, you can make positive prints from this edit. If you make an in-camera 100ft film on negative on a bolex with no splices you can either print this film to make a projection copy positive or if you foresee the need for many prints, you can make  IP/IN copies so that the OCN material is kept in good condition as running negatives through a printer, or any machine will produce wear and tear.

The neg/pos system is being employed again here. The Orig’ OCN is being copied to an IP. An interpositive, a positive image on a negative (orange hue) film stock base. Then if this is printed again, it will be an internegative. We are always going from neg to pos, pos to neg like making molds and then casting a new form.

So the neg/pos system are two sides of a single coin. One is not complete without the other. Forget ‘reversal’ film for now. Reversal film is just a way to get a positive image as quickly as possible from the camera film which is infact what it is. It was developed for amateurs and the home movie market because home movie makers didn’t or couldn’t use a neg/pos system and it was thought that home movie makers would not need dozens or even hundreds of copies of their films which was right, they didnt!!

There are some exceptional Artists who work with and use Reversal film in a process that involves printing or copying (Gaëlle Rouard comes to mind) but the unique artifactual value of the finished film just goes up and up the more this process is followed, and final films are projected adding to the deterioation. Perhaps life is too short to worry?

My question is this: RE Bolex RX H16

If you want to mount your camera on a tripod or other device and you want it to pan around the optical axis you will find that the mounting holes on the flat base are NOT on this axis.

This may not be anykind of issue for people but for me its a disaster. So what is the measurement from the ‘line’ that the 3/8 and 1/4 holes makes (RED LINE) to the optical axis (GREEN LINE)? Does anyone know? Yes, just measure it you say. Well, where are you measuring to, by sight, to the middle of a marked safety cap maybe, to the centre of a marked safety filter maybe, etc. Surely this information is known by Bolex?

Anyway, I’ll measure it for myself and publish it here…. 17.7mm.
107mm, height of Op’ axis above flat base

Finding the Nodal Point of a Lens

Last thing to fix before getting on and shooting tests is the take up power suplies for the 120V/AC motors. Budget restraint means I’m using cheap electronic transformer/variac but it seems to work. Ideally I’d like to design somekind of clockwork mech for the mag film tensions because its hard to make this camera portable with a 120 volt supply. The camera motor and PSU can run of 36v and I’ve built a PSU that uses 2 x Makita lion batteries. Seems crazy to need 120v just to keep film on t-cores so clockwork is the answer.

(NB) Alright its not the final thing. Im actually just designing a viewfinder that uses the boresight access hole on the optical axis of this camera. This camera is a NON-reflex type, its also not even a rack-over type. Once you compose, you need to fit the sprockets, load the film and work blind!

Finally fitted this nice perspex door for the projector head on the printer. Will keep things nice and clean and protected over the coming busy months.

Platter cinema system tables are big pieces of aluminium with curved sides mounted on rigid spokes and a decent bearing. I’ve had them kicking around for years and they started forming ideas when I was thinking about how to employ them creatively. So I’ve got around to mouting a vertical one against black. Next will be some maths and geometry and figuring out dimensions and works. Ive got one I painted black as well. I will also be making a horizontal mount for other ideas.

An oxberry optical printer and rostrum stand often use very similar cameras infact there is very little difference between them.

An optical printer images the target upside down in the gate so you thread it in the projector the right way up. This helps you see what you are shooting. Its printed in the gate as if it were being projected so if you print to POSITIVE stock its ready for projection once it is processed.

However on a rostrum camera the artwork or the flat pegbar area infront of the operator is correct for your position but infact as a target its upside down if follow the system above for an optical printer. This means it gets imaged in the camera the right way up which will cause problems. Now, if you reverse the teeth (this is all for 16mm btw) on the camera sprocket and load the raw film in the normal take up magazine and run the camera backwards it will orientate the image onto the emulsion side at head of the film so the film can then be printed as above.

This can be seen in the crude image below where the little stick man on the bottom left is a person working at the peg bar artwork table.

Then, as in this video below, we load film from take up mag, reversed by sprockets and run in reverse (it runs forwards here just to load ref mark into place) we get an image orientated as it would be in a normal camera loading ready to be printed.

Most of the cameras I use (and projectors for that matter) are driven by a motor where one full turn, or 360 degrees equals one frame of film (they are all optical printer or animation cameras).

There obviously needs to be position accuracy because the camera needs to be closed when the motor has spun 360 degrees, made its exposure and comes to rest, ready for next frame.

The way this is achieved varies from camera to camera. On the Oxberry, the motor is an expensive ‘pancake’ style printed armature motor. Its spins very smoothly, has zero ‘cogging’ and other features. Its position is known to itself because of an optical disc that stops after each rotation. This is handy BUT what if I want super long exposures. And, to replace this motor is cost prohibitive.

Enter Closed Loop stepper motors.

These systems have really improved in recent years so now for less than £100 you can get the motor, the driver and the PSU. To operate the motor, ie to make it spin, a microcontroller is used such as Arduino or Raspberry PI. I am using an Arduino.

The functions which the motor will be programmed to perform can go way beyond that possible with the motor system on the optical printer. However, the printer can extend its functions by also being controlled by an Arduino and I am working on this aswell.

For this experimental animation / plate / studio camera I need a way to control exposures and position as well as other possible inputs like the postion of objects being filmed.

I’ve dug out the beast and next need to design mounts that place the camera at the nodal points. These heavy geared heads were really useful in the old days when your cameras was also heavy. To machine something like this now is cost prohibitive but thanks to digital ‘progress’, you can buy them if you are lucky enough to see one for sale. I dont like the design of the top angle plate, held only by bolt tension. Decent heads have a pivoting shoe design that has mechanical rigidity. If a heavy camera slips on these tensions it could crush your hand or a finger.

Back to the Arduino programming. It’s hard. Thats because I’m not a programmer or coder and so I have had to start at the beginning with getting an LED to blink. Some deme code to make the motor run has kept me busy as you can see below.

Quick wish list function table……………..

Then, after NIkon F mount plate is done we can start Rotoscoping to our hearts content.

To get this camera working I’ve managed to hook up another Oxberry part, actually a 2 speed projector drive, seen below.

The motor runs on 115v ac and the solenoid fires at around 36vdc. When the solenoid fires it allows a clutch plate to slip thus engaging with the driven gear shaft and momentarily (ie 1 frame) turning the camera drive shaft which equals 360 degrees and thus 1 frame of film.

Although this will ‘work’ and allow exposures to be made it has limitations that that conflict with sonme of my planned uses, specifically long exposures of several seconds and sometime minutes. To afford these functions I have invested in a closed loop stepper motor.

After all this the last thing will be to get the Nikon F mount at the correct distance from the film plane.

I have already tested this distance to check lens function by rotoscoping and all is well. This camera body has a boresight opening which may allow some kind of framing as long as the sprocket drive is removed.

However, Im not so obsessed with this function as I Like the idea of framing by projecting a small piece of clear film and seeing whats in the frame and where it is. It will be a heavy thing when finished hence the geared head I bought a while back. My planned uses Im gonna keep under wraps for now but just to say it will be a kind of studio / plate / process / animation camera for both 16mm and 35mm. Interestingly the camera body has an 8 perf opening by the gate so, using a vistavision shuttle one could expose portrait format 8 perf film!

Table for ND filter set. Made up from only 3 gels. Half stop gels are sold by LEE. Can do 21 stop wedge strips then.

Shutter speeds /deimos control. Need to double check by shooting some hi-speed video on phone.

Owing to the hybrid and vernancular nature of my printer, the camera speeds are not set the same as on a proper Oxberry. The Oxberry printer head has 4 speeds set by a gearbox effectively. However, the faster speeds, say 4/second will cause problems when used with Deimos speed 1. Thats because that camera speed is only 1/2 a second so isnt fast enough to keep up!! Even though much ‘faster’ shutter speeds are possible on the camera by using the adjustable angle, the FPS speed is independent of this.

There might be a case to rethink the master-slave direction in my system. Currently the projector is the master. It triggers the camera. It dictates the sequence. Is it possible to reverse this? Could the camera dictate? Then, if fast projector speeds are set, all it does is load a new frame quickly, but camera is always prioritised? Its interesting that it works either way. So its like two different modes.

LUX IN GATE READINGS (only made 7 filters……..)

(NB Because its not a probe meter, readings for lamp vary considerably. Need to devise registration method)

More on ND filters reading here

Well, cabin in the corner of the garden anyway. Trying to crack on with this so that anyone who wants to come and work at Asylum or my studio can stay here. Anyone who doesn’t want to work here can stay as well because that is what friends are for. It will have double bed, woodstove, a fax line, morse code terminal and electrification. Guests can use the house WC and the plan is to build an outside kitchen and traditional Cob oven. Im naming it ‘The Library’ because I’m ging to fill it with books, 95% of which are about cinema apparatus, film theory, experimental film and the other 5% is about Toads.

When I work in Londinium I stay near this place. Amazing.

To see if the sync 16mm system worked I made up two identical loops with the exact same frame marked. Amazing when it worked but slightly dissappointing when it didn’t.

Here is a view of the river mersey looking out to the ventilation tower for the tunnel.

The whole of the workshop/studio has been planned around an central, empty space and a free wall. Everything like filing cabinets, sets of drawers, storage has been bult on wheels so can move out into the corridoor for more room. I finished the overhead scaff riggin the other week for lights and flags. Few more tasks on some machines then I can start making things.

I made use of the Mag follower by using its 19″ racking for the amps and Eqs, for the sound from both the steenbecks. Keeping this area tidy and free of cllutter is crucial when editing material gets hectic.

Its official. I hate this thing. Its SOOO unreliable. This time however it might have got damaged when some drilling took place on the frame of the printer. Looks like the bridge rectifier has blown! It can be fixed (my electrical friend tells me) but I hate this box anyway. Ok, it does an important job. It controls the motor which drives the camera on the Oxberry. This requires a stable 18volt DC supply for a duration controlled by the motor feedback. The motor is hugely expensive to replace but modern drivers do exist but they are very complicated to set up. Lots of people just run these machines with modern stepper motors. Also, when I was testing the motor to locate the fault I managed to fry the logic chip on the motor feedback board. Great! So currently no camera!!

I came into work one day and the fairies had been busy. Because there on the lens platform was a new lens x and y stage drive rig. Also it had a T-bar plate so I could mount lots of different lens plate holders.

I immediately marked off all the basic optical processes ie 16(35 to 16(35) which uses same setting. 16 to 35 and 35 to 16. This took most of the day but now its all marked it will be quick to find the settings again.

This is theoretically going to work right?

Ok, its only been about 10 years since I made these negs and never got round to printing. Who cares, I’m in no hurry. Sometimes ideas take a long time to develop as well. The idea here though was quite simple. To make sound recordings on the Eurocord-Klangfilm, then document the machine itself.

You got to admire the lomo spiral. Marvel of plastic engineering and design. I prefer the morse however.

The manual table is really the best and most satisfying method of going through films to catalogue, inspect, repair, select, prepare for viewing or copying or projecting. Its film nearly at its most peaceful.

Ive got loops and stuff but my lens of choice to view strips of film are Bell&Howell 60mm lenses that you find on the 16mm projectors. The table area is a bit cluttered so I am going to make a shelf on the wall for reels, splicers, tape, etc.

My 16mm print of ‘Dream of Wild Horses’ by Denys Colomb de Daunant looks pretty faded. But maybe it wasn’t in full colour originally anyway. So can it be restored photochemically? We will see.

Added the sound head block to the Matipo to check fixings. Slight deviation from the neat film only path but should work once I work out the voltage to the light.

My studio practice, when I get there is going to involve smallish table top stop motion animation, diaramas, mattes, experimental set-ups and lots of rotoscoping. For all this you need lights. Good old BB-list delivered these nice 1k fresnels in the end. Ive got some old Mole-Richardson 2k fresnels on stands, lots of overhead lights like Minim F’s and Preludes, redheads and PAR36’s. All tungsten.

It is well known that flat table editing machines can be modified into contact printers. All that needs to be done is to black out the screen and any light leaks from the cabinet. Make somekind of slit that covers the prism and mask off any light straying out from the prism block. You then load your neg on the mag-stock platters and through the image gate and your raw stock following the usual film path. Emulsion to emulsion. The light passes up through the prism, through the slit, through the neg, through the raw film.

The two sprocket drives need to be engaged so the films run together. Ill document the gate assembly here as it will involve some engineering and adjustable slits. Just changed the fan in this machine. All I need to make it FWO is a new optical sound head. Lew!!!!

My film, ‘Me at the Zoo Too’ is an attempt at thinking as the medium of film.

It depicts, or rather interprets, or rather ‘thinks about’ the first ever youtube clip to be uploaded, the celebrated and widely written about ‘Me at the Zoo’ by Jawed Karim which has currently had 270 million views and counting. It was uploaded on 23rd April 2005.

My concept involved transfering this clip to 35mm motion picture stock as a way for the analogue photochemical film material to ‘quote’ or comment on not just the clip itself and its place in history but also the whole system of online video and user defined video.

Simplistically seeing it as a moment in the history of moving images therefore necessitated its archiving and preservation for the future and the best technique for this is motion picture film.

The clip is very short, 19 seconds. In my film it appears twice.

In the frst clip it appears as a very small, stamp like image in the middle of the frame.

The size is not arbitrary. In actual fact, its the relative size in pixels of that first clip (320×240) within a full frame 35mm image. To be projected properly it requires a cinemascope gate or aperture plate and the correct lens for scope BUT MINUS the animorphic adapter. In effect it is the same as for a fox movietone 1.19:1 film, a film with full frame and optical soundtrack.

There is then an interlude to change lens and gate.

The second clip is sized according to a DVD video image (720×576) within a widescreen (1.85:1) frame, hence the cropping. On the screen the grey coloured area is masked out by the aperture plate so there is an argument to keep it black. But, film is not ONLY projected, so I wanted something to indicate all the factors at play. The sound is mono, printed as a cyan VA optical soundtrack.

These different factors are variables afforded to or intrinsic to the film medium. Therefore they act as parameters that add some level of interaction with the clip that is forever recorded into the piece of work.

The QR code at the start is a link to this website. It only occurs for 1 frame though so references the manual viewability of film, ie a when a person handles the film to rewind, examine, etc.

An error occured during the digitisation of the clip (wrong colour space defined) which has resulted in a weird colouration. It looks more grey than it should and there is no blue. I quite like this though because the presence of Elephants is an important conceptual one.

Another idea for how this work engages with the notion of the internet is what happens when it is viewed in cinema spaces.

The online original has every viewing counted and logged. As an artifact, outside of that system, individual viewings can not be easily counted (ie a print projected infront of an audience) and so the qualifying value must reside in some other (than metrics) dimension and I would argue this is the social basis of cinema.

So screenings of this film in cinemas or galleries to a congregated public, are diametrically opposite online viewings.

Another aspect of this idea is that it could be exhibited as an object. That is in a vitrine or diplay case with notes etc.

This is another dimension afforded to analogue mediums like film. They are objects and artifacts that can embody an idea or concept in multiple dimensions of time and space.

It comes with projection instructions if anyone wants to screen it. Two copies have been made. I am considering getting more made using the correct colour space.

I am working on other films and Art works that use similar concepts.

Me athe Zoo Too formed the ‘practice’ component of a MRES (master of research) that I did at UWE which had as one of is aims to explore how a film archive / lab can act as an experimental production mode.

Like anything in an interconnected world I start to prepare and finally paint the floor and get disracted by old electronics. This is the way.

I blew a part on my sound follower a few years ago. I had turned it on to check functions and work out how it worked and then a little pop happened and a puff of perfect white smoke rose up from within the PSU block somewhere inside the machine. My thoughts then, after looking closer at the board concerned was ‘what chance is there of fixing this?’.

Well, several years later, I’m clearing the workshop to paint the floor and the sound follower is stood there on its own. I think, fuck it, lets have a look at this thing, partially spurred on by the success with the Kinoton spark circuit. After removing the PSU block and taking a closer look at the blown part I can see that its easier to get to and remove than I first thought.

Anyone had much experience searching for old manuals online? Well, you get these companies that bought up loads of service manuals and now sell them off for what feels like silly money. I found a complete manual including schematics for a similar-ish model to mine and thought it would be worth the risk of getting it.

I was very happy when it came because it had everything I needed plus more because it was also an opearation manual. I challenged myself to find the correct schematic and part ‘before’ I consulted my electronics friend.

What we are looking at here (took me a few days to decipher the manual and its detailed outline and indexing system) is a part of the PSU circuit where there are 3 relays. rel.1, rel.2 and rel.3. I knew that the blown part, after extracting it, sat between two relays, most probably 2 and 3. I also know, or had learnt from my friend that the part was a RIFA which were known to blow because they allow mositure in. You can find umpteen stories on the internet with radio engineers and electronics folks waxing lyrical about when it happens to them. They act as noise suppressors across mains lines in audio equipment. Easily replaced by modern ceramic caps.

The manual also shows some additional parts (which I dont have) that I guess I’ll be chasing for the next twenty years like this optical sound reader.

You may well ask what is the point of this machine? Dont! Don’t, you understand! Don’t ask this question, never ask this dumb question. Its a machine and it needs our love and attention. It did a job, a good job back in the day and theres absolutely no reason for it to retire from this job. It was built by human hands, designed by human minds, run by human skills and enjoyed on the cinema screen by humans!! What more fucking reason do you need.

So after some successful use, the right hand side projector xenon lamp has started to refuse to strike. Each time it is struck it blows the 6amp fuse on the lamp house. Having experience with igniter units, tesla coils and the scary electrics involved I was fairly pessimistic about being able to fix this. Everything inside the lamphouse looked in good condition.

At first we thought the spark gap had popped because the right side machines’s clear chamber had frosted. However we learnt that this is normal.

But then a good friend of the Cube turned up and looked throught the circuit schematics. He ascertained that the assembly responsible for handling the mains to DC handover and the initial spark might be the culprit and offered to remove it for a closer look. Underneath was some carbonising which would exlain the failure to work. He took it away and cleaned it, repaired (already badly undertaken repairs) and resoldered. After we’d put it back in it fired up and all is good now!!!

Before.

After.

Heres the newly soldered component set and the two lamphouses undergoing checks and comparisons.

These old cinema 35mm projectors are in St.James’s Hall in Kilbeggan, Eire.

The plan is to somehow or other restore them to working order and maybe modernise the light sources as they both ran carbon arc lamphouses.

see this special edition of REWIND (by the PPT) where the first projectors mentioned are simplex.

In this publication are also very fine examples of projectors being restored and we should aim at this level and quality of work.

Really getting fired up and excited going through loads of resources at film labs website.

I havent looked at their website for a while so am blown away by all the work thats gone into this. Theres literally everything there you need to shoot, develop, project, etc motion picture film. Amazing, great work guys, keep it up!!!

Im giving a talk at this festival. see below. I’m revisiting some of my research that came out of the work I did on digitising the Curzon Cinemas nitrate clips. This involved looking closely at the mechanical operation of flicker as it occurs in reality in a projector in a bid to resist the erasure of a film projectors presence in digital file versions of film born material.

https://www.efea.co.uk/

This is my chance to do a proper job aligning, leveling and improving this machine. From previous set-ups I’ve learnt a lot about what is wrong with the design. Heres a load of snaps showing the awkward assembly of the projector on two steel rails that just bolt to the top of the main frame. This part of the machine has to be assembled section by section as the machine screw location tolerances are high so its impossible to bolt together if you are also lifting/wriggling it around.

This could be improved by a new frame that spreads out more and includes screw-jacks to dampen/support the circular rails that the lens and camera move on, which wobbles like fuck, even when all locked off.

Heres is an older oxberry camera block than the one mounted on my frankenstein optical printer.

This camera has no rack over viewfinder. It has a voltage controlled movement and adjustable shutter angle. No viewfinder seems like a problem for a camera. How on earth can you compose, focus, even see what you are shooting? This camera will be used as a camera for matte work where other plates (film elements) have been shot elsewhere by another camera. These plates are laced into this camera as if it were a projector. When the image is projected it will allow an image to be framed, traced, focussed. Once this is all done, raw film can be swapped in and composites shots can be exposed.

It has a 35mm gate and sprocket movement. It also has a standard 16mm, 2 pin gate! Finally!!! All in all its in very fine condition. Some work will need to be done to get the electronic controls working. Heres a bit of double pef film in the gate. Of course, if I wish to shoot onto single perf stock I will need to remove one set of pins. But this gate would be better suited to copying, or duping by holding material on double perf film

Heres some pictures of the prep for getting a lens onto the camera.

All that is needed is to machine a block of alloy/ali to fit the front machine bolt locations, put in a Nikon F bayonet mount, space and align the plate correctly and paint the inside black.

OK. So I am very happy with a new pair of 1000ft mitchell film magazines and here is one sitting on top of the animation camera. However, these mags have a wider base fitting known as NC (newsreel camera) and the camera uses one called GC which is smaller. Just waiting to hear from someone in LA who has an adapter. Hopefully not to expensive.

These mags are for the eventuality when large runs of film need to be exposed, possibly towards final prints for exhibition. Magazines can also house exposed film for certain operations such as long runs of rotoscope material, or at least longer runs than what 400ft reels can afford.

Here we see the Cube buildings from Princess Row, the staff door entrance. A nice detail is the glazed windows in the Lantern. This lantern feature was originally the means of light coming into the workshop which is now taken up by the wooden, fan shaped, raked, T&G auditorium. We would like to restore these glass features and explore the possible cooling and heating offered by controlling the air temp and flow in this volume which sits directly above the cinema auditorium. Plus there would be an aesthetic value adding to the historical roof views of this area as well as possible night time illumination.

This section shows the modification that was made to the orignial 1916 workshop for the Bristol Deaf Centre. In order to get the height for the proscenium arch from the viewpoint of an audience seated in a raked auditorium, pitched RSJs (x 3) span from back to front. The orignial lantern frame was sliced into and now sits on these steel beams. Everything below the angled RSJs in this drawing was removed.

These 2 plans were drawn up by Keith Day Architects on behalf of Nicholas Upton, the Cubes one time building owner and our landlord. Above you can see the reference to the 1963 Archive material that must be in the Bristol Records Office or the City Planning Office.

Old photo of Mark Berry on one of his UK visits. Ray is probably playing with Danny who is out of shot. This is the back door of the projection room at the Cube Cinema which leads out onto the roof of the garages in Princess Row.

This endlessly resourceful and insprational booklet by Esther Urlus at Worm in Rotterdam is now available as a pdf. Here is a link to the pdf version. Its free and its amazing!!!!

http://www.filmlabs.org/docs/toboldlygo.pdf

I suppose one thing that seems to be appearing more and more as a focus of interests is the idea of practical explorations of historic cinema (trick photography) techniques but with a very different set of image outcome aims, ie not trying to create ‘fantastic’ or even ‘literal’ images that illustrate a mythological storyline or visual interventions into illusory realities as they find expression via photography. Rather, the aim is to explore what ‘other kinds’ of visions these techniques can bring to fruition.

Seeing as they arguable arose out of the application of multiple techniques (say double exposure properties, models, stop motion, matting, etc) when put into the service of very specific ideas (say, ‘How do we bring this statue of Talos to life?) it also stands to reason that as an individuated process or entity even, they also permit or afford more than the specific instance that contributed to their design. So this is a reversal of the ‘Idea > Technique > Realisation‘ way of doing things to produce ‘Technique > Idea‘ where the idea isnt preconfigured and the Realisation is the appearance of it!

The PLAN in new room is to create as much SPACE as possible. I can do this by putting all filing cabs on wheels. Everything on wheels. Then with an overhead scaff grid and clean / free wall I can operate it as a studio and actually work towards making the films I have been planning and devising for years. The whole room is also a DARKROOM as there are no windows. Things like old Kalee projector bases become incredibly useful as bases for scenery, lighting rigs, model rigs, projector rigs, etc. There are no distractions out here. The cycle from the station is arduous and my back is killing me. Once in, its the same bunker vibe as the office at the Cube. Time flies by as one scurries deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole……….

In every moment of an analogue film projection, there is another mask, or matrix, or screen which is going to effect viewing and viewers in different ways than the perception of visually recognized cultural forms. This ‘FLICKER’ based screen is the total background field effect of an analogue image regardless of the content of ‘the image’. This screen is also present in DCP projection but this is not currently the object of my study. Throughout the history of cinema analogue presentation, this ‘flicker screen’ has been remarkably consistent and there are various ways of measuring its ontologcal properties as well as its psysiological impacts on human viewers.

Regarding the former of these, this is of course linked to the essential nature of analogue film itself, ie 24 frames per second image succession rate. So 48 hz and 72hz are common frequencies as they represent 2 bladed and 3 bladed shutters respectively. But, as I’m trying to investigate in other pursuits on this blog, should we count the blacks as well as the lights. A two bladed shutter shows each 1/24th second frame twice, but it also shows a black/rest twice resulting in the (truer?) frequency count of 96hz? We also have the issue of ‘duration of image segmentation’ within the overall flicker field. Is it just too simplistic to say that beyond the 8 – 30hz ‘danger zone’ we are nevertheless still in a ‘health threat’ zone.

The first thing to note about these frequencies is that they are SLOW. They infact sit near the threshold of human flicker cognition which is commonely said to be around 80hz although this is a complicated field that goes into cone properties aas well as neural ones.For eg, an easy test to do yourself is look at a projected image head on. Then look above it, you will notice flickker more when you look above or away and this must be down to the different capacities of eye components to perceive flicker.

LINKS listing

https://www.led-professional.com/resources-1/articles/flicker-beyond-perception-limits-a-summary-of-lesser-known-research-results

ALZHEIMER’s https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200203141446.htm

This isnt my photo but you can see here an interesting feature of a vistavision gate in a printer holding a standard 4 perf 35mm film strip. The ability to see the framelines top/bottom means that adjustments to new framing can be made very easily.

There was an Oxberry vistavision gate for sale recently on a trade website and Im kicking myself now for not buying it.

See the Vi archive pages link above in main menu or go here

Also here is my recent ‘MRES’ dissertation whose full title is

DEVELOPING AND DEFINING AN EXPERIMENTAL ARCHIVE, PROCESS, PROBLEMATICS AND PITFALLS.

I received a 62 with merit for this believe it or not…….

I can see many shortcomings, errors of thinking and failures when reading this now and I will be producing my own written commentary on it this spring.

If anyone reads or is interested in it please get in contact. Any kind of commentary, feedback, criticism or support is welcome. Naturally if you use any of it then please give it a proper citation.

https://www.nachleben.org.uk/skomer/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/G-HOGG-MRES-DISSERTATION-SUBMISSION.pdf

I quickly looked at worm filmwerkplatz’s Oxberry when I was in Rotterdam.

It is a beastly machine, felt like being in an empty room with a Bull.

My phone is broken hence the out of focus image.

Im quite jealous of all those proper moving stages. Each one with a micrometer scale. Also those things are built ‘so’ well, and heavily sprung which means movements are possible during photography like sideways shifts, etc. Unlike mine which I have to tighten with spanners and wrenches just to shoot straight.

These are pdfs

16MM-FIELD-CENTERED-image

SUPER16-FIELD-CENTERED-image

Here is some 35mm film can designs to help inform ideas about designing a new one for Nachleben.

Getting set up to shoot titles, graphics and other things to 16. Some films will employ content in the VA sound track area but for ones that don’t I must remember to mask off this area with black foil clipped to the glass.

Heres a 16mm frame projected to align the soundtrack, centre point and margins for the printed material.

The film travel and NF are reminders that once printed, this image and thus film will be orientated ready for projection. I could add some perforation markers as well I guess.

The optical soundtrack centre axis probably does shift form print to print, this old TRRL print being a case in point as the peak waves creep near to the edge of the printed area.

Here is a graphic printed out and mounted.

Underneath is an approximation of how it will look once printed to release stock. When I designed this logo, years ago I didn’t plan for it to be photographed and thus reversed. Weirdly then the flint axe and the camera come out correct. Weird. I got this idea when I was projecting some films by Luke Fowler. The ones he made to show with Alasdair Roberts playing live. I turned to him and said, “a bolex is like a folk instrument now….”
Under that is the view through the finder lastly to confirm a pretty good alignment.

I’m considering which database to use. I quite like Card Box 3.1 for windows, because it seems ancient and thus low impact, and possibly even reliable.

https://www.cardbox.com/

heres a framegrab from sample database

Dave at Geneva Stop lent me this morse tank.

It loads 196 feet!! of 16 or 35mm, but dev times are longer. There is not much data out there on times other than 4x the usual 5 mins (generalising). Its easier to load and use than a Lomo.

Also, it occured to me that it would be relatively straight forwards to design and build a tank this way that held 400ft.

For some of my MASTERS practical projects I have decided to shoot frames of film negative on an Olympus PEN. This camera shoots half frame, which is exactly the same size as a 35mm motion picture frame, ie 4 perf.

I will shoot on XP2 and PAN F. Then once developed, I will hold each frame in the gate of the Oxberry and ‘print’ it for a duration down to 16mm print stock.

This way I can produce the lengths (in time and feet) I need from a very cheap and portable original technique. Its not crucial at this stage to have a moving image. In fact, its conceptually more accurate in some of the films I have planned to work from ‘stills’.

The film doesn’t really advance EXACTLY 4 perfs like a motion picture camera does, it kinda wobbles around in registration a bit. So what I do is shoot a few of each subject that I want so I have a few to choose from.

Here is something that is really deepening itself into my thinking at the moment. I’m putting it up here because its a good way of making thinking visible in a documented and engagable way.

Two words.

Miniature Shields.

This shield is over 2000 years old. From the picture you can see that it is only 100mm long. Is this in essence what cinema is?

An engagement with scale? A toy (make believe) a votive offering (magic, ritual) a talisman? When we look at this shield, for a moment we are accessing the thought process of Iron age people.

Cinema too is an engagement with scale. First we make things tiny. The film frame is tiny. Then we make it massive, the screen (compared to the frame) is simply collossal.

I am inclined to think that the ‘imagination in a modeled reality’ that is present in these shields is a similar thing to what ‘cinema’ became in its early period of adaptation. Of course we can always find historical precedents for things of the present but here there seems a striking occurrence of a form of ‘media’. As miniaturizing puts material into a tactile scale it suspends the normal meaning of the object, making it ‘the object PLUS reference to another reality; faery folk, us as giants……

I am slightly obsessed with Vista Vision (above) and Techniscope. The former of course ran horizontally and took up 8 perforations. ILM revisited the format for Star Wars to enable a larger, non-animorphic negative to pull off their effects.  But Techniscope goes the other way. Developed by the Technicolour Labs in Rome, Italy, it takes up 2 perforations. The effect of this 2-perf high frame but full width is a widescreen (scope-ish) image that doesnt require animorphic lenses, any normal spherical lens can now be used to shoot (effective) Cinemascope. This isn’t all though. It also doubles the stocks running time. A  10 minute reel becomes 20!

Now 2 perf adapted 35mm cameras are rare. But, thinking this through I realised I can shoot Techniscope on my 4 perf Mitchell! First I make a 2-perf apeture plate that sits in the gate of the camera. This will crop the neg exposure area down to the techniscope AR. Then frame and shoot 2 perf FRAMES, but move the film 4 perf. This would leave a huge gap on the neg if we developed it. Next, I rewind the film (close the shutter and cap lens!)  and via a registration notch in the film I then lace it 1 frame out of sync. This would expose now into the gap! Then in the printer a similar process is used to print alternate frames restoring the sequences. This WILL, work, its theoretical now, but there is every reason to believe it will work.

Lastly, if we don’t observe leaving space for the soundtrack and expose using the full width of 35mm then the aspect ratio becomes a healthy 2.62:1!! I would consider this for the UFO/psychic/dream-horror film being planned about the Rendlesham incident as this is planned as a fully SILENT film.  AR graphic below.

‘Super’–Techniscope with a 4 perf camera!!

Here is a  stunning, well researched document about all the various RAMA Vista Vision cameras that ILM used.

From now on all my production projects for the Archive Film Series will be made using this camera, the oxberry and small developing tanks.

The specification on this Fries/Mitchell 35R camera is unbelievable. The remote controller in the picture lets you program so many ways. It can shoot 1 – 120 FPS (all at crystal locked speeds), it can shoot single frame with programmed bursts with exposures in standard fractions or long exposures ranging from 1 to hundreds of seconds. It currently takes Nikon F Mount lenses, handy! It can shoot forwards and back always to exact frame count. You can programme runs with feet/meters or frames. The shutter does the usual 170 degrees to closed over range.  Checking if it can be bi-packed. Also I got it running on 12VDC so I can take it into the field.

My plan is to produce all my Archive series films for my research projects practical components with this camera and make positives with either the steenbeck contact printer or the Oxberry. Also for using existing (found and collected) positive footage I plan to copy to 35mm using an internegative stock, then print back down to 16mm via the oxberry where I will have a chance to make frame stops and permutations of frames and copies. etc.

Having this degree of control over (mostly studio based) film ideas is a massive boost to the ambition and scope of ideas, especially the series based around bulk pass exposures.

The camera is a little heavy and unwieldy. Not as much as you might think though. Thanks to Aardmans for lending me an airhead mo-co to let me mount it and pan-tilt in tiny increments.

However a Mitchell geared head is really what I need when I take it outside. If anyone reading has got access to one of these and is happy to lend it please let me know.

I am eternally indebted to the late Bolex Brothers animation studio for this acquisition.

Good results from tests with oxberry, single image in gate, 35>35, halogen lamp. etc

Did loads of Lux measurements in gate but there’s no real guide to EV levels that are required and also the shutter speeds are not really calibrated, or even known.  Also the image is sharp closed down (as you would expect) BUT super soft, un focused almost, at larger T stops. A T-stop ramp test is required.

Was using Kodak Eastman 5231 in D96, etc. All results are in log book. Dev temp 23. Dev time 5.5 min / stop 50 seconds / Fix 2 min / wash between ALL /

Many things learnt from this test.

1.  Prepare more accurate frame counter and test set up.
2. Don’t use slowest vary speed, low torque and not reliable.
3. Top up D96 to 1.5 Litres (you can see the dev level mark).
4. Use T-stop ramp on best exposure.
5. There’s not much difference between the numbered settings on vary speed.

A fluke, but afterwards I laid the original over the neg and its a perfect 1:1 match. Ie the image is an exact copy size wise, a perfect accident.

Been spending a lot of time on the Oxberry making the digital scanning set up work better.

Test results are good depending mainly on the res of the scans, high res just means more processing later to compile photos into moving image sequences.

I’m doing some studio tours in July as part of the Cinema Rediscovered Festival . In these tours I will be showing people around my work spaces so they can see some of the machines I am fixing and also so they get have a hands on go at lacing cameras or projectors.

The details of my tour are here.

At the same festival I am also running a glass slide / magic lantern slide workshop at the great Curzon Cinema in Clevedon.

I have just come back from the Eye Annual Conference in Amsterdam which was themed this year as ‘Activating The Archive’  and I will be making some key interest posts here soon.

Also very pleased to acquire a 35mm camera that will shoot sound speed as well as single frame and this machine will form the basis of all my next practical projects.

I am also into the main practical /written research project for my MRes so there will be much activity over the next year.

So me, Rod, Hoppo and Richie managed to pull off our performance at BEEF and Brunswick Club Saturday just gone.

I thought I’d write up a breakdown report of all the techniques, projectors and processes we devised and used. This is is aimed at myself as documentation but also, as I  believe in the spirit of open source and sharing, at anyone who is interested.

Picture 1. Shows the basic rig with following projectors from the left.

Hand cranked 16mm Elf (customised by ‘Carter’). Used for melting black film during a section with the ‘eclipse’.

Two Epidiascopes prepared with lamps. Used during the ‘Blue Soup’ section. The shadow was provided by a blown lamp the same type used in the epi-scopes. Each lamp is on a switch and dimmer controller that is effectively a primitive ‘instrument’ that can be “played”. The lamps are held in place by stands that also allow fine focus of the part of the lamp being projected. Lamp types were Sylvania Halogen spots 10 degrees to 30.

Xenon OHP. The light source for the opening ‘Stars’ section (pin pricks in black foil over the OHP) and the ‘Blue Soup’ part. The blown lamp is placed in the water tray on the OHP to create a shadow that the epi-scope lamp images then fill.

Solar 250. Provided the moving blobs of murky light in black. Oil wheels that have been filled with car sump oil.

Two 35mm Mignons. The lighting, earth, clouds and burning earth loop was a 35mm ‘Greenpeace’ short film/advert.

Two Rank Tutors with prepared gate/object assemblies. An iris effect and a ping pong ball ‘eclipse’ effect.

Later we added a couple of Kodaks (carousels) and a hand held Super 8mm Eumig that was operated from the front during the ‘Eclipse’ set.

I’ll also post picture of the audio set up I was using. Basically I had a small mixer and several sources including two 1/4 tape recorders, a Nagra 4:2 and a Tandberg, A Volca Bass Drum, a Waldorf 2Pole filer, a Bug Brand ‘CUBE WEOVIL’, a outboard effects unit (Beringer Virtual Composer) a mic source from the cymbals played by Richie Smith and a couple of sources used by Hopkinson, a portable turntable with a 12″ locked groove record and a little noise box unit.

On tape I’d recorded earlier in the week a session of Richie on a particular cymbal at full speed which I played slowed down. I also recorded a bread knife being twanged on a table which was also slowed down. On the Tandberg I had a reel of a rising shepard Tone.

New 35mm gate from BB list, at first was loose and I was worried that perhaps a spring was missing.

But I undid the film transport frame/sprocket and relocated the frame into its proper place.

Now running like a dream.

Need to fix take up motors on camera now………..

I have finally, after what feels like 10 years (prob 10 years since acquiring this machine) but is actually 5 years of storage battles, makeshift repairs, huge learning curves (electrics, relays, soldering, circuits, mechanics and optics) got to the point where this Oxberry-Neilson/Hordell bastard printer is working enough  to make tests to ascertain what still isn’t working. I know for a fact for instance that when you rail the lens/camera back on the geared bed, the image shifts DOWN! and this tells us that the whole optical axis is misaligned.

Still a minor victory for me personally has been to; complete the basic functions of the projector head and its link with the camera; fix the camera motor and shutter mech; design a solution to the relay lens mount and open out the electrics/electronics enough to make way for modernisations like programme control etc (this will be next).

There are still so many things to do now. Final setting, level, align and fixing of the whole geared bed. Camera TUPS. Better digital counters. The perspex door to projector and any mods to this to allow LED array lighting. Acquire gates to allow 16>16 and 35>35 (really holding out for Steve at MONO.NO.AWARE for this massive help). Plates for the manual stage to mount DSLR (digitisation), Bolex (16mm alternative to Oxberry single frame camera, ie filming off gate at sound speeds), and other cameras. Experimental colour light head. Arduino or ‘C’ written programme for full control. Using Telecentric lenses. Then when all this is done actually make some bloody films.

More on the machine part I bought years ago. I have finally, after a bit more in depth research worked out that it is the basic mechanism from a Debrie Parvo L series camera.

Here is a link to a film of its manufacture and assembly.
http://cinematographes.free.fr/videos/debrie-3.mov

Heres some good photos of a complete one in the Malkames Collection.

And here is the manual, in Swedish, but it shows many features like the gate that swipes over to allow TFL focussing.

The unit I have got has got several modern interventions. Firstly it has some of the area around the camera gate machined away to make way for somekind of lens (I dont have the whole shutter lens assembly, the housing or a lens). Next its got a mirror placed inside the viewfinder passage. Lastly its got a breakout drive mechanism. All these point to it being converted to a projector. When I bought it it had a lamp-house attached above the mirror.

My plan is to build it into a camera again using modern lens mounts.

I am presenting at the Ghent Early Cinema Conference and will be showing my idea that Cinema design, the building itself may of played  a part in the adoption of narrative forms of cinema films, or those forms that were more story and duration based and required suspension of disbelief to read and enjoy.

I will do this by sketching out first how cinema and theatre related through the agency of the actual building and how some early cinema buildings were really theatres.

Then, after some examples of early cinemas that started to do away with ‘distractions’ like a stage, pros arch, fly loft, wings, apron, lighting, etc I will  show how as the cinema space became more simplified this in effect took place in parrallel  to narrative forms becoming more central and dominant in exhibition.

Is this a chicken and egg problem. How can it be shown that the audiences physical behaviour during narrative required a particualr set of environmental forms that may or may not have been in place during the transition period? And if they were not in place how can we see their effect in building design and towards which ends?

I will be looking at a selection of early plans in terms of the period they were submitted and what was common in Cinemas at the time, then I will be examining particular design features like projection throw, rake angle, seat angle, relation to stage and wings,and how the screen gets presented to the audience.

Of course we know that early Cinemas took their architectual cues from Theatre. BUT, and this is decisive, theatre is an entirely different technical environment that has very specific environmental forms and these differ radically from what simple, Cinema proper, buildings became.

As an informing idea for another project I am going to start to collect cinema metric data.
I am narrowing this down to the following:

Compass bearing of projections : Angle of rake :

Thats it!

I could add Throw (film gates to screen) in M/mm, number of seats. To allow venues with multiple screens each screen could be numbered.

So an example might be;

105° : 5° : 20M : 350

This example is made up.

This doesn’t seem to tell us much. But when we have a data set including many different places you should be able to start seeing patterns.

Heres 2 photos taken during a shutter test where the blade has been almost closed over and a very tiny slit is all that lets any light through.

This would produce a shutter speed too fast for effective exposures (in convnetional use anyways). The LED light source illuminating the paper on the other side of the gate flickers and this produces the strobed scans of the slit as a photo is taken with an iphone4.

Using a linear stage from Thorlabs and some basic metalwork I can now accurately position a digital camera or just the lens to line up with the camera.

A bit of tweaking to get the relay lens bellows to fit. All that needs doing now is take up motor electrics, then I’m ready to try some film to film tests.

During tests very annoyingly the Nikon remote release socket stopped working and the camera needs to go off for repair. Having digital preview is useful for predicting problems for later film>film work and for digitising friends work  BUT my whole artistic project is about using a |film > film > projector| workflow so the more I gear up for that the better. Digitising becomes another distraction. You end up fucking around in editors, compiling and rendering things. The quick spectacle of seeing video clips (ok I’ve posted a few) starts to take over.

The creative potential of unexplored techniques like ‘shadow’ printing (my invented process that dodges and burns during contact printing) can never be moved along if Im always scanning and playing with video.

I did some light level tests also. The LED array Ive been using for some scans is WAY dimmer than the halogen 11ov lamp. Although its whiter and cleaner it may well not work for film.

 Is there such a thing as a digital contact print? ie a scanning process that does not ‘image’ via a lens but instead lays the film upon the sensor?

Also been looking at telecentric lenses for the Oxberry. These lenses offer a very accurate profile and were the types of lenses used in ILMs quad printer and the printers that Richard Edlund built at Boss the Zoom Aerial Printer and the Super Printer, both 70mm.

Quick test scan off the printer of acid treated and burnt through short length of film. ST should be on right of course. 16mm

Lab leader I found. 35mm, sent to Matt Soar for possible inclusion in his project lost leaders

And my favourite, a video clip of film passing through the gate.

And another clip I like thats shows the fascinating transport and arrest of frame by frame machines.

OK. Its basic stuff, but there are exact and meaningful orientations of film strips in printers for obvious reasons. But you can get in a muddle thinking about whats right, what ‘looks’ right and what you think should be right.

This video shows a 16mm sequence in the printer gate, seen as by the video camera. It clearly shows an image that we know is the ‘Right’ way up but is flipped Left>Right. The VA optical sound track is to the left AND we should know that this soundtrack actually appears on the right in projection. The sprockets on the printer are on the right so we  know that if this image was copied it would flip L>R  and  Up>Down and would be wrong in projection because to go from any image to projection we turn it 180 degrees.

This sequence shows an upside down image in the gate, with soundtrack also on left. The reason this is slightly annoying for digitisation is because when set up for for film to film copying the bench lens would do the job of correcting the image, turning it 180 degrees. But a video camera (I guess the image is turned 180 degress on the sensor) corrects the viewing image (screen, HDMI output, etc) for our convenience. So this last clip is correct, turning it 180 degrees makes it right.

I helped prepare and rig the flying screen at the Cube for Spectres the other day. Went really well. The perforated screen, if lighting conditions are right looks transparent at one moment and acts like a screen at another moment. Heres some video clips.

Here is the camera as projector again. The 100mm lens produces an image (through 35mm gate) that fits well into the punched paper we were planning on using for the leader project. But to save paper, registration problems and building time/money we might now shoot off an ipad screen which fits perfectly the 190mm x 138mm image. The soundtrack width is 18mm.

This one shows the peg bar above the paper so we hang the sheet from it. Once we trace around this frame we have a very accurate measurement of the shooting area covered and thus the physical size of the artwork.

TO DO:

tests projecting widescreen frames, scope frames, academy frames and 1.66 frames, infact use a test loop. Need to ascertain the relation of oxberry full gate to all other formats.

Starting this soon. Going to video off rostrum rig I’m designing for Andrew Manias clip collection.(no posts about that yet anywhere) and add talkover narration afterwards.

I don’t even know if anyone reads these posts. Perhaps really I make them for myself, to chart progress, and refer back to later on. Well, actually here I am now reading this for reference, so yes mate, uts quite useful to yourself to write up these things.

So with an light dependent resistor, micro-controller and signals into MAX I’m finally on way to measure shutter speeds.

With current set-up that needs tweaking and improving we’re getting the following initial results.

Deimos controller speed setting:

1.  shutter fully open                         640 milliseconds
2.  shutter fully open                         340 milliseconds
3.  shutter fully open                         240 milliseconds

Heres normal shutter speeds in fractions then millisecond figures we are looking for.

/th second                     milliseconds

1/1000                             1

1/500                               2

1/250                               4

1/125                                8

1/60                                 16

1/30                                 32

1/15                                   66

1/8                                     125

1/4                                     250

1/2                                      500

Once the shutter gets closed (it will eventually close over completely) we should see faster and faster speeds. Presently the measuring resolution isnt good enough the accurately determine these speeds.

The controller has 3 settings that produce different DC voltages for the motor and produce different speeds to the spindle/shutter that results in different shutter speeds. The videos below show the 3 speeds and all these clips have the shutter set to 170 degrees. My first attempt at the linkage had the effect of a tiny amount of open shutter after firing a single frame so Ive rejigged the setup by turning the camera mech 90 degrees.

Below is shuttle cycle showing pin registration during exposure. So the linkage is set up right.

VERY great step forwards but I got the camera motor controller working and rigged it up to the camera to see how it runs and it runs smoothly, beautifully, accurately!!!.

The controller has loads of speeds that turn the main spindle/crank at different speeds so that means different exposure lengths AS WELL AS the different lengths provided by the variabe shutter which can be adjusted during running. The motor tacho EMF feedback circuit works well accurately registering the spindle/crank in precisely the same position each turn or run of turns.  Next Ive got to design/build (probably Arduino) a gadget to measure the shutter speeds/exposure times and design a (better) system for programming sequences on the printer, remember the set-up as I was given it was configured for 1 to 1 blow up printing from S16m to 35mm/4 perf (full gate). This is a bit limited for me. I want to be able to run very complex mathematical ‘rhythms’ for want of a better term as well as obvious things like skip printing, reprinting, reverse printing, loop printing, etc.

Finally uncovered the oxberry camera motor. Its a printed armature motor that is typicaly found in industrial environments like automation, medical, oil&gas etc. They are extremely precise, very smooth, have instant torque and other exciting mechanical properties. In our application we are just spinning a mechanisim and taking one picture. But this motor will provide an exact time signature for each exposure as well as even things like variable speed, etc.

Here is a  test scan to see what kind of frames I can produce on the current camera/lens set up. When I come to fully digitise this small piece of movietone (1.19:1) format Nitrate I will frame the picture area only.