On-Photocopy show

So this is an exhibition that invites people to think about the Photocopier as a means of production. It's run by Fringe Arts Bath, and my interest was raised when I saw that video entries were allowed. Couldn't really at first see how you could incorporate video into Photocopies, but then was struck by the idea of using an old clip art book as the basis of an animation and also making it photocopiable by using the frames as the basis of a flick book.

The clip art book incidentally is the same one that Jack Vettriano used to get the figure shapes for the painting "The Singing Butler". I believe he got some flak for that - but that's what these books were produced for back in the 70s and 80s.

Here's the first experiments. Having told a class only this week I rarely use filters in Photoshop, here I am trying a number out to see how they work on the figures. I've already photocopied them from the book, scanned the copies and they are now in Photoshop. The plan is to modify the colour a little and maybe use some of the filters to rough it up a bit. Firstly I'm using levels to bump up the contrast. The copies are a little flat and at the size of the flick book they will be hard to see.

The next picture here is different effects applied to the cut out images. To be honest I don't much like any of them. I thought I would go for the one in the middle where I have imposed an additional layer of half-tone dots - but the dots are difficult to apply and crude at the size things need to be. I'm using a derelict ballroom image I got from Wikipedia as a background. I thought the original was terrific and captured the idea of displacement - the theme quite well and the paper ballroom dancers will be like ghosts forever dancing around. You can see the original here.

Once look of both the dancers and the background had been decided they were brought into Flash for animation. I had planned originally to do all the animation using paper cut outs - but figured I'd like a life and couldn't see that being done in under some considerable time.  Even so the slow dancers were time consuming to animate, you can see a bit here; basically there were not enough intermediate poses to get a smooth slower animation so I used fades and small colour shifts to add interest.

Flash gets a bad press now days. A lot of web people are a bit sniffy about it and there's no doubt it was overused a few years ago. But it's still great for many things, animation being one of them.

Here's the final result, at least the small gif version. The full version is 40Mb, which will be a nasty downloading surprise for someone if I post it.

Next is to do the flick book. When that's done I'll post a link and see if anyone downloads it and makes it up.