My Abstract Films

Every time I find myself with free time, such as if I'm trapped somewhere with my laptop but no WiFi (aka Millennial's Hell), I start to make movies. I have a lot of old footage on my laptop, and with Microsoft Paint, you can do very simple images that you can then manipulate a bit. I tend to create 70 or 80 individual images and then bring them into my editor and play around. 

Today, I'm showing off Smith Diamonds, a film I made maybe 6 months ago. It's a simple film, but for me, it's pretty complex in the areas it goes into. 

You see, I love the works of Harry Smith. I've talked about him before, and the images he would create directly onto film. the simple geometry he employed certainly plays in my head. I can't draw or paint, but using Paint, I can make simple, and very precise, geometric patterns. I started the series of images thinking I wanted to show the growth of these diamond shapes, eventually ending up at a square with the rotating colour patterns. 

Of course, once I had the simple images, I wanted to play with them. 

The original portion where I simply imported the Paint images is roughly 12 or so seconds, and the rest is repetition with various colours removed allowing for transparency to show a background. I have done this video with various films as the behind, and I think I hit the right one here with a decaying piece of film of an amusement park. Layering it behind the dimondas with all the black lines removed, and then adding colors that get removed, led to an effect that seemed to make the edges of the diamond shapes seem less distinct. That was something I was going for. 

So, here's an abstract film I made. There really is no meaning, per se, but it's something that I think expresses what I want to be able to do with video.