Entoptic Acid

After quite a lot of playing around, making stuff, discarding things, speculating, face palming, getting really excited about something theoretical but totally useless practically etc. I’ve finished a short film. I wanted to make something that could have the immediacy of the little loops I have been putting on instagram without it just feeling like a contrived mish-mash of bits I had lying around.

The process I used to make it is so simple it’s a bit of a joke compared with my all the complex notes and diagrams I had been scribbling and the weird stuff I tried out. All to find a structure that’s comfortable, allows me to improvise and felt like it justified the use of hand-drawn images (unlike my previous film, Draw Bars, which felt a little like it was a digital film in an analogue costume). The process is basically doing a big painting: Drawing a layer of marks and photograph the surface a number of times. Draw another layer and photograph. Etc. Etc. I had a rule which was that I wanted to do it all in-camera, so every photo I took went into the film in sequence and there was no editing. Its was a fun way to work as the actual animation happens really quickly and I had to make quick decisions rather than sit around trying out different renders and tweaking things and its a break from the way I work on my other, more commercial, stuff.

The sound was all recorded by me in Renoise where I made several virtual instruments that I could play with in a knob twiddly way with a dodgy midi controller I’ve built.