Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Neg cut

Today I did the neg cut for my film "Grain: Summer - I Can't See the Forest Through My Dreams". What this means is that I cut the film negatives into two rolls with the even shots on one roll and the odd shots on the other roll with appropriate lengths of black leader in between them. The lab needs it this way to make a print. I should be receiving the optical sound track any time now and then I can send it and the negs to another lab and they can make me a print that I can show with a projector. Usually this is done with a specialized hot splicer in a quite sterile environment but since my films recently have had such a wrecked aesthetic (due to all the hand processing) I have been doing the neg cutting myself on any table that I can find enough space on and I've been using a tape splicer instead of a hot splicer because I never did get the hang of those things (lots of stinky glue and if you don't do it right it falls apart later). I've not finished a film like this since my last "Toxic" film (#5 was the last one completed as #6 was done early). I think I finished Toxic in 2004 so it has been five years. This will be the first 16mm film I've completed without the late Rick Doe of Calgary's Local Film Lab since the early nineties. He printed "Doubt" (1997), "Life is Like Lint"(1999), and all 6 "Toxic" films (2002-2004).

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