“Film on Film”: Films About Filmmaking September 12, 2009

Event: “Film on Film”: Films About Filmmaking , a program exploring the tools and techniques of cinema including: The Art of the Motion Picture, Frame by Frame, How to Make a Movie Without a Camera, Filmmaking in the Classroom, Editing a Film, Filmmaking Techniques and rarely screened animated films such as the award-winning Frank Film, Begone Dull Care and much more. In addition audience members will create a film to be screened as well. Don’t ask how-just show up!
Date: Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 8:30PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp St. San Francisco (Off Mission between 17th and 18th)
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or [email protected]
Web: http://www.oddballfilm.com/oddballftp/Film_On_Film_PR.pdf

“Film On Film”
Magic Lanterns, Projected Images, Films Made Without a Camera and Super Kooky Animation
Screens at Oddball Films
“Film on Film: Films About Filmmaking”, a program exploring the tools and techniques of cinema including magic lanterns, projected images, cameraless films, editing techniques and more screens at Oddball Films, 275 Capp St on Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 8:30PM. Admission is $10.00, seating is limited so RSVP’s are essential. RSVP to: [email protected] or 415-558-8117. These films showcase techniques for feature film and independent, even experimental and avant garde filmmaking, particularly the post sixties period when film was cheap and filmmaking was more free-spirited. The program also features some classic examples of hand-made animation including Frank Mouris’s brilliantly animated Frank Film and animation legend Norman McLaren’s famous award-winning short Begone Dull Care with music by the Oscar Peterson Trio. Also: The audience will also create a film to be screened during our program!

Featuring:

The Art of the Motion Picture (Color, 1973)
Paul Burnford’s production was produced for High School students as an introduction to the art of filmmaking. The Art of the Motion Picture defines and showcases examples of the five basic elements of filmmaking that lend them selves to artistic control by the filmmaker including composition, lighting, editing, filming of movement and sound. The film emphasizes creativity and experimentation as much as it seeks to provide a basic film vocabulary.
Frank Film (Color, 1973)
An autobiography of Frank Mouris and a stop-motion free-associative collage of 11,592 media images collected from magazines, which shift and mutate across the screen as Mouris reads a list of words starting with the letter "f". The words bounce off the images and trigger memories, which Mouris recounts on a second track, interwoven with the recitation. Mouris received an Academy Award and the film was selected in 1996 for inclusion in the National Film Registry. Frank Film, because of its innovative and energetic use of collage, has exerted an influence on succeeding generations of animators.

How to Make a Movie Without a Camera (Color, 1972)
Michael and Mimi Warshaw’s film is a non-stop sampling of the wonders of found footage and hand-made movie techniques. The film incorporates techniques such as scratching, acetate inks, and food coloring, felt-tipped pens, bleaching, rub-ons and various stock or found footage elements creating an instructional yet experimental film. Famed avant garde filmmmakers such at Len Lye, Stan Brakhage and dadist Hans Richter created entire bodies of innovative, abstract cameraless film using direct physical techniques such as these.
Begone Dull Care (Color, 1949) w/ Evelyn Lambert
Vibrant, abstract images drawn directly onto the film. Begone Dull Care shines with masterful use of scratching and painting on film stock. The film gives warmth and movement to compositions resembling a constantly morphing Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning painting, yet never fails to remind us of its very calculated aesthetics when it suddenly adapts to the score's slower movements and shifts from expressionistic and oversaturated explosions to minimalist vertical lines that vibrate accordingly to the score by the Oscar Peterson Trio. McLaren’s whimsical genius shines in this winner six time international prize winner.
Frame by Frame (Color, 1973)
At this point in time it’s rare that imagemakers touch their media. But film (16mm or 8mm) is inherently a hands-on, tactile process.
In that lies the simplicity and beauty of the filmmaking process.Frame by Frame provides a detailed an informative look at film animation techniques including flicker, time lapse and single frame techniques. Other techniques such as cut-outs and drawing on tracing paper. The film emphasizes a free-form approach to filmmaking with eye-popping pop art and psychedelic clips.

Editing a Film (Color, 1975)
No program about filmmaking would be complete without something about editing. Larry Yust’s film uses sequences from the film version of John M. Synge’s play The Well of the Saints to illustrate the “proper” and “improper” techniques of film editing and to describe the role of the film editor in motion picture production. Even you if never edit a film this short will open your eyes up to basic editing techniques.
Yust's produced films for Wexler Films, television dramas for PBS, and directed three feature films. He is best known for his outstanding films on dramatic themes. For more info on Larry Yust visit: www.afana.org

Filmmaking in the Classroom (Color, 1969) Watch kids from San Rafael’s Davidson Middle School script, design, shoot and edit super-cool Super-8 animated sound films. See them animate frame by frame a biplane dogfight set to the 1960’s bubble gum song “Snoopy Versus the Red Baron.”Produced by Ken Rosenberg Films and KPIX TV.

Plus! The audience will create a Exquisite Corpse film and screen it!

About Oddball Films

Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educationals, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant garde and ethno-cultural documentaries which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.