Double Exposure Film Experiment

I became fascinated with the double exposure images and experimental photography of the dadaism and surrealism movements this semester. I decided to play around with some of those ideas in a short film I put together for my final project.

First I collected images on a Pinterest board to have some inspiration for the film. That can be found here: http://www.pinterest.com/nodgedafunk/dadaism-in-photography/

The images in the course reading material also inspired me, specifically works by Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. But the image that gave me the inspiration to work off of as a basis for the concept in my film was this:



Landscape Specimen 004 (Havisu Falls) by Derek Johnston.
His image of Havisu Falls in a glass jug was where I decided to take the direction of my short film.

I began to collect short clips of anything I could find interesting and caught my eye, like roads, landscapes, wildlife, etc. Then I went to Michael's and The Dollar Store and found a bunch of glass bottles of various shapes and sizes. I also borrow some from my friend Jinx Vesco, who had many unusual glass jars. Then I used a black cloth, draped over a stool or chair, and set up some lights to get the effect of the glass on a field of black.

After that, I used After Effects to take out the color and up the contrast. This created a clean piece of glass I could place over the clip I wanted to show inside the glass bottle. Then I set the glass layer to hard light, making it show the layer beneath where there was white (or light sections) and no image where it was black. In a few cases I had to make a mask around the glass to get the effect as well.

I then rendered out each of those clips, and then pieced them together in Premiere into a two minute timeline. Then I found some music to suit my mood and rendered out the final cut.

Before I decided on the glass jars, I tried to play around with double exposures here.

As you can see, it gets a little confusing, and maybe that is alright, but I didn't like it.

This is my finished film:

As you can see, I tried to fit a lot into two minutes, and I believe I was successful in creating something interesting with the images I was able to capture.