Yesterday we started to prep ourselves to actually shoot the work. We looked very closely at the preview material – Lux preview tape, Lyn’s documentation on YouTube, the rough ‘telecine’ we made up in Brisbane from Guy’s actual film strip literally minutes before he used it for his performance. We also found part of the Brisbane tape of him demonstrating with baby table how to actually do the mirror movements.
One of these pages documents our notes on the timings of the mirror movements, the other is us working out how to stage it in the garden at Petersham and how we should re-size one of the mirrors so it’s relative to my arm span.
We discussed how we imagine presenting the work – clear at this point that the position of the projectors in presentation needs to be a mapping/index of the position of the cameras in the shoot.
This one documents timings from the documentation.
This one documents where to position the shoot in the garden and the correct distances for the cameras and the sizes for the mirrors.
great sketches louise!
you write
“how we should re-size one of the mirrors so it’s relative to my body height.”
to add a little to this:
this for me was an important discovery of yesterday.
Guy’s original screen/mirror size is 32 by 24 inches. the ratio of width to height of the mirror/screen is 4:3, the same ratio as a super 8 film frame.
since I am roughly the same height as Guy, the 32 by 24 size presents no problems for mirror handling twisting turning and manipulation. Louise, being smaller than me, having shorter arms, was finding it difficult to wrangle the mirror. We decided we would get her mirror cut down proportionately to her artspan. Thus:
-original mirror is 32X24 inches (=61X81.3cm)
-my armspan is 188cm (same as my height)
-louise’s armspan is 163cm (same as her height)
-thus following ratio of armspan to size of mirror, louise’s mirror needs to be cut down to 70X52.5cm
Good one, yes, this was yesterday’s crucial and satisfying discovery. Satisfying I think because we’re looking for ways in which the work has to intrinsically adapt while we’re trying to be as truthful as we can to Guy’s work. Another good discussion yesterday was about where to film. We have always discussed the garden in Petersham as the site. We talked about Guy filming his on Hampstead Heath and that Sydney Park could serve a similar purpose for us. However, we imagine Guy would have had to film somewhere other than home as his house would have had little to no backyard. We on the other hand have the backyard. We also discussed how important the tree shadow is and that the Petersham garden can provide this. We tried out a few orientations yesterday thinking about the blur that Guy creates with his swinging mirror and discussing if Petersham provides too much visual information. There was quite a lot of discussion about the Hills Hoist, we seemed to like it featuring in the reflections. In the end, we think we can work it out so that the light’s suitably dappled and it’s not so cluttered visually that it becomes illegible.
The shadow/sun dynamic seemed quite good at about 1pm yesterday. Conditions were full sun and light breeze. There is a ‘lump’ of shade southwest of the clothes line and then shade in a line along under the trees. The shade is quite dappled. The clothesline also has possibilities for creating dappled shade at that time of the day. If you are at home today, can you check out how the sun goes later in the avo. I think we’ll find the shade gets too dense, not enough dapple.
LC
checked.. definitely early afternoon is good in the yard, between 1 and 4 gives the “dapple” you want…