Near the Egress
June 18, 2010 2:44 PM   Subscribe

Near the Egress. "Over 800 modern dryplate tintypes were made from b&w film to produce this experimental stop-motion video of a circus. Antonio Martinez created this video to serve as a desired childhood memory of the circus, but through the mind of an adult." [Via]
posted by homunculus (9 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
That was beautiful and very cool. The sound design made the think that guy did not enjoy the circus much as a kid.
posted by OmieWise at 2:52 PM on June 18, 2010


Beautiful, and spooky. Perhaps that's fitting for an adult view of the circus.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:52 PM on June 18, 2010


Wonderful. Makes me want to go back to watching Carnivale again...
posted by farishta at 3:12 PM on June 18, 2010


The effect is like a dream or a very distant memory. I love the random chemical colors and smears and light leaks created during the tintype process.

They come across as staged, not random, to me. There's at least one frame that has a huge fingerprint on it -- that's not an accident, and all the spills and bubbles aren't accidents, either. Tintype is not as messy and haphazard a process as that. This guy is deliberately "doing it wrong" to generate the raw material for the film.

The result is interesting, but the "antiqued" image artifacts distract me. I just want to draw a distinction between it and work like Bill Morrison's Decasia that uses "real" decayed source imagery to, I think, more powerful effect.
posted by gum at 3:17 PM on June 18, 2010 [2 favorites]


Completely beautiful.
posted by haplesschild at 3:20 PM on June 18, 2010


This is good.
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:13 PM on June 18, 2010


It's funny how one changes during one's life, but I eventually realized that elephants are very intelligent creatures, and are only persuaded to do painful, unpleasant things like that by being being taken away from their natural environment and having sharp sticks poked into them.

Forgive me if I cannot see how "beautiful" and "good" this video is.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:25 PM on June 18, 2010


There's at least one frame that has a huge fingerprint on it -- that's not an accident,

I don't know, man. Making tintypes is hard. Can you imagine making 800? Besides, the fingerprint is probably on the film stock. That's more common than you would think .
posted by lumpenprole at 11:03 AM on June 19, 2010


From personal experience making a tintype is much easier to do compared to using liquid emulsion to make a dry plate tintype. Its harder than it looks to get the liquid emulsion coated on the surface evenly, not to mention trying to prevent it from peeling off the surface before you finish processing it &c. Whether he was intentionally doing it badly or not, I thought he used all that can go wrong with liquid emulsion to good effect for the most part, just not sure I like the fade/blurry bits to transition between scenes. Reminds me of old peep show movies using something like the Kinora.
posted by squeak at 1:55 PM on June 19, 2010


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