Robert Lyons's Videos (The Visual Music Village) - The Visual Music Village

"Cellular Memories" Pratt Experimental

2016-06-17T22:27:32.019Z

Created with the students of my 2016, Pratt DDA, Experimental Animation class. The same hand painted, cameraless, 35mm film footage is used two times, first digitized full frame with a modified Wolverine F2D-20M slide converter, and a second time photographed under a Celestron 44320 digital microscope and Dragonframe software. Edited by student Robert Bergin and myself. The music is "Plantasia by Mort Garson.

"Scratchorama" (Cameraless Cinerama)

2015-04-24T20:42:58.677Z

Cameraless animation, sometimes referred to as hand painted cinema or scratch films, is a technique that lends itself to producing vibrant and energetic moving images that I have long enjoyed experimenting with. This film was the result of my first tests using an modified Wolverine F2D-20M slide and neg film digitizer for my cameraless animation digital conversion. I created some adapters to the Wolverine to accommodate various motion picture film formats (16, 35, & 70mm) and to offer some new options for aspect ratio. This film was made using a 1 to 4.0 (Cinerama aspect ratio) adapter.
The music is "Jungleaya" by Los Straightjackets.

"Scratching the Surface" Micro-Cameraless Phase ll

2015-04-19T22:18:05.540Z

Camareless animation created by myself and the students of my 2015 Pratt DDA Experimental Animation class using a Celestron digital microscope and capturing to Dragonframe software. I chose an eight frame strip of 35mm film from each of my students contributions to our hand painted and scratched celluloid, cameraless animation group project and had them experiment with it under the Celestron to see what would happen. I took that footage plus some of my own experiments and edited it all together using the song "Hands - Phase 3" by The Stick Men. To see my previous micro cameraless test go to https://vimeo.com/124753797

"Scratch Tornado" (Micro-Cameraless)

2015-04-19T22:16:16.726Z

This is my first test of a Celestron digital microscope that I bought last year. It is USB connected so I tried using it with Dragonframe single frame capture software. As people who know me are well aware I do a lot of cameraless animation (drawing, painting, scratching, etc of film stock) so I decided to use some of that material for the test. The microscope was being used with the 40x-80x lens (there is also a 150x-300x and a 300x-600x lens on it as well that I have not tested yet) This was basically a cheap, plastic microscope but worked pretty well for these tests. Everything seen in this test was generated from only four frames of 35mm film. The music is "B3" by the Adrian Belew Power Trio and is in no way synchronized to the imagery, it just happened to be the correct running time and I like it. See the follow up to this test at https://vimeo.com/125343586

"Robot Dreams Made Flesh"

2015-01-24T23:35:55.774Z

This was an experiment that was also the very last thing I shot on my Master Oxberry animation stand before it was donated to MOMI (The Museum of the Moving Image) in 2004. I took some 16mm B&W time lapse footage that I had previously shot with one of my Bolex cameras of model maker, Michael Sullivan working on his stop motion animation opus "The Sex Life of Robots" as part of my "Artists in Motion" documentary project "Sex Machines", and synchronized the positive and the negative as A&B rolls. I then used those rolls as bi-packed traveling matte windows to print imagery of circuit boards, flesh, meat, and various electronic and mechanical components on to color film stock. The B&W stock was very old and grainy, and I never did a proper transfer of the color composite footage, so the project sat on my shelf dormant until recently, when I dug it out and decided to have some fun with it in the digital domain. Music is "Five" by The Hadron Big Bangers (Robert Are, Martin Ear, & Duane Berge).
https://hadronbigbangers.bandcamp.com/releases
http://robomike.com/