Ride of my life

This weekend, a reduced version of Domino has won the award for Best 1 Minute Film at filMO.

This filmfestival was organised by LABoral. This Art and Industrial Creation Centre is an exhibition centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries. It is also a venue for artistic and technological production, research and training; and for the dissemination of new forms of art and industrial creation.

This particular picture reminds me of the construction of wooden rollercoasters, which would be beautiful for our project. Beautiful, but not practical. We need a system that can be easily deconstructed, and wood just isn't.

Finally! Our rollercoaster demo track is finished. Next step: placing frames and testing the animation for speed, graphics and size.

Second day and we already see some results:  a short piece of track and a working car to hold the camera. Tomorrow they face the real challenge; making a bended track.

This week we have a visitor: Johan Spits. He will help us build a test track and a car to hold the camera. On the first day we went to buy all of the necessary materials and build these nice workbenches to work on.

For the development of the content -the script- we work together with artists Simona Denicolai and Ivo Provoost. In May we went to take a look at their first ideas. Looks promising! More soon.

Our 'new' animation technique refers to old techniques like the praxinoscope, zoetrope and a simple flip book. Where animation is a product of an installation.
We have to build a rollercoaster for our film, so why wouldn't we expose this as an installation aswell?

With 'Ride of my life', we want to go further than 'Domino' and create a live recorded animation.
Instead of working with a straight track (f.e. Domino: 2 meters were about 12 frames, in animation that is 1 second of film!) where we had to stop and refill the track with new frames, we are going to make a miniature rollercoaster. This rollercoaster will hold the whole film (about 4000 frames = 3 minutes). When the camera goes through the frames a live animation will be created.

That's the technical part. In Domino we hadn't much time to explore the content, for this film we want to tell a story which is in line with the technique. So we create an interaction between story and technique.
The story is about one person with a normal, but turbulent life (ups and downs). The technique will amplify the emotions. For example when the person is depressed, the camera goes down the track, maybe even goes upside down.

So, this is the idea. Now we have to further develop and investigate the technical possibilities and storyline.

Two years ago we were invited to make a mobile film for a competition at IKL 2007. This was the perfect opportunity to experiment with an old idea of us: what if the camera 'rides' through the frames? What kind of effect will that create?
Domino was the winner of this competition, and in 2008 it was 'best mobile film' at Cinepocket in Brussels. Two confirmations that this technique works.

Now, we want to further explore this technique with 'Ride of my life'.