Working with actual film was a fantastic new experience, I have always wanted to work with actual film. Other than being very excited about working with film, the actual film manipulation was an awesome time. Not knowing how the final result will turn out was a definitely new experience for me. Whenever I have shot something in the past, I will scrutinize it looking for any flaw and try fix it right then and there with another take. Take that mentality and compare it to the film manipulation where you can't make any changes or an undo button, just a little scary.
I really did not like the magazine transfers, I see what the point of it was and the effect that it achieves, but I enjoyed actually manipulating film stock. Drawing and altering the frame was a lot of fun, while incredibly meticulous, very satisfying. Same for the scratching away some of the frame. I wanted to scratch away a large majority of some of the frames and only leave the actor's heads. I stopped about two frames in because it was about 10 minutes of work for 2/24th of a second. I did scratch out their faces for about 1 second, but it felt like the work I did was a lot more. That was the general feeling I got working with film stock, it was a long process for not that much payoff. While the final result did look very visually appealing, actually doing the manipulations was a little tough.
When JT and I combined the film at the end of the project, we had absolutely no clue what it would look like. We were both very pleasantly surprised at the end result.
