Stormy seas and big adventures

A Happy New Year to you all.

I always get excited by the turning of the years - new beginnings and all that. I never expected 2015 to be quite as productive as it was, but in all the years I've been doing this full time I have to admit that was my busiest year yet and I hope next year will continue this trend.

Here's to 2016 and all its new adventures...

Sometimes we scare ourselves

I took a few sequences when I worked with Rachelle Summers recently and hopefully over the Christmas period I'll catch up with myself.

Everything I'm doing at the moment seems to be about learning and I've noticed that although everything was constant between the two sets of images there are differences in the tones of Rachelle sitting, so I present this GIF as a work in progress. Hopefully I can work out what went wrong and I'll have learnt something new to take into future goes.




Rachelle Scares Herself

Copyright: Clayton Bastiani
Model: Rachelle Summers

The Argument

I had a wonderful shoot with the model Rachelle Summers last week and had the foresight to take a series of pics that I could work on over the Mondays running up to the Christmas break.

I'm thoroughly enjoying making pictures with very simple camera trickery techniques. In keeping with this interest we worked on a series of double exposures that would work both as individual still shots and sequential GIFs.

It can get a little complicated at times, splitting the film into two, counting each step on the first so that it matches the second. Your mind can get lost in trying to work out the logistics on some of the more complicated attempts, but I think we managed to get there in the end and I'm looking forward to bringing the remaining work together over the next weeks and seeing the final pieces.



The Argument

Copyright: Clayton Bastiani

Model: Rachelle Summers

The Soul Departs

On Friday I attended the award evening for this year's BPOTY competition. It was an honour to be included in the judging process and although my social awkwardness kicks in amongst large crowds I thoroughly enjoyed the private view. Congratulations to all the winners this year. Very well deserved.



And before you know it, we're back to Monday. (This year is going frighteningly fast).



It's good to make mistakes, so long as you learn from them. This morning I made loads of them and by having to go back and correct them I learnt lots. I'm rather enjoying making GIFs and hopefully will continue to make them. They're relatively simple, fun, and offer a way of working in sequential imagery, allowing you to convey a passage of a story.

I don't always set out to make ghostly pieces, but when playing with double exposures the paranormal becomes an excellent subject to work with.


The Soul Departs

Copyright: Clayton Bastiani

The Magician - Part Two

So you get these ideas in your head and you think 'you know what? I think I'll try that next Monday'.
And then you start to try and make your idea, only your initial idea won't work and you need to try a few things before it starts to come together. Then it's on your computer and again you're not quite sure how to do it so you go forwards and backwards all afternoon working out the logistics. And the clock keeps ticking 'cos your Mum's coming round for tea and you've got to get this finished by the end of today as it's a Monday project, right? and all work needs to be finished and submitted by midnight.

You also realise by mid afternoon that you don't like cutting out hula hoops! Why did you choose a hula hoop? Crazy fool. Must put aside some time to practise cutting circles.



So anyway.

A thick strip of wood, a brave model and some guesswork at where she was once that bit was sorted and as if by magic you have...





The Magician - Part Two


Copyright: Clayton Bastiani
Model: Tigerbelle

Green Badgers and the Headless Man

When I was a child I belonged to the local cub scout group and as part of our activities we went camping a lot. In those times before we fell asleep we would either play space battles on the inside of the tent with our torches or frighten ourselves with ghost stories - the most popular of which were tales of the giant Green Badger (I kid you not), and the Headless Man (who seemed to only haunt the toilet block making us scare for our lives if we needed the loo in the middle of the night).






Influences:

Apart from watching R.W.Paul's 'The Motorist' I've made a little list of films and clips to look through over the next weeks:

A Page of Madness
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
The Seventh Seal
and Nosferatu







The Headless Man

Whack-A-Mole

Ghostly Capers

The Crash

Disa-Rea-Ppearing Act

Box-Portation

The Student Becomes The Master GIF

I had some issues trying to attach a video of the sequence to The Student Becomes The Master, so I thought I would try again at making a GIF and upload that here instead.

The Sudden Wave video edit

The Sudden Wave

If it's not fun you're doing something wrong. 

Still thinking about narratives and sequential work here's a little improvisation involving an empty room and a roll of cellophane.  

The Sudden Wave

Copyright: Clayton Bastiani

Influences:

Real Life: Taking my wife to the boat this morning.

Book: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. (My first attempts involved a journey across the cellophane water but I couldn't get it to work this morning).

Film: Almost everything by Georges Melies

Photography: Duane Michals, Francesca Woodman 

The Traveller GIF

I've never made a GIF before, so thought I'd use The Traveller series for a first attempt...