Monthly Archives: July 2009

Here is a first sketch of an idea that I did to accompany Dima’s latest composition. Both my drawing and Dima’s playing have a lot of mistakes but I thought I’d post the video anyway and if we do a better version in the future it will be possible to compare them.

I thought the beginning of the clip was working OK but then I got a bit lost when I started to draw the full face heads in the middle section. We do everything in one ‘take’, so this means that I can’t just cut out the sections I’m not pleased with and substitute something else – quite a good discipline for me or I would be for ever chopping and changing things, hoping for a better end result!

I realise that I usually draw with the transparency slider set to opaque so I thought I’d do a few experiments varying this setting. At first I worked with the background dark.

But then I decided to cover the whole drawing area with opaque white and use this as a background to draw on, using black in varying degrees of opacity. This little clip shows the various stages in the drawing process.
I used limited colour in the next clip, again drawing over an opaque white background. Then I used the fade slider to successively ‘erase’ the completed drawing and reversed the order of the photos to make the final image magically ‘appear’.

When I saw on a recent posting on the Tagtool website the photos of drawing over trees at the Übergänge – Přechody festival I immediately thought, ‘This is an idea we must copy here some evening!’ We have a number of very big old apple trees in the orchard – right next to the barbecue – the ideal location for some after dinner entertainment…..

It wasn’t very easy for me to take photos with my little camera but Dima also took some shots with his good camera too, so what follows is a selection that I hope gives a good idea of the evening’s drawing.

As you can see Dima’s photos are brighter and better than mine!

As this was a first experiment we didn’t take out the video camera, which was a pity. One of the really interesting things about projecting on the trees was that there was only one position where the image could be seen clearly and without distortion, so if you walked past the tree the image gradually ‘appeared’ then disappeared into the leaves. This is something we will have to remember for next time!

This is the video of the Tagtool drawing session that we prepared for the party at Schmacke’s place in Berlin last weekend. Some of our Super8 found footage includes scenes shot in Berlin in the 1950’s so we thought it would be good to capture this and use it for the background. The soundtrack is by our friend Anja Kaufmann, jamming in a live session with Dima.
It was the first time we had taken all our equipment to perform at a party and setting it up was quite a performance in itself!

However, in the event the projection worked really well, there were loads of people watching and a lot of interest in the Tagtool. After we showed the video we did some free drawing and animation. This was a lot of fun and went down really well so we didn’t pack up all the equipment until 3am – quite a session!

Here is another little experiment combining one of my Tagtool drawings with some video captured Super 8 found footage used as a ‘background’ to the drawing. Colour and opacity of the final drawn image were altered using the Edirol mixer and I took seven digital photos recording the different colour effects. The video clip was made by combining the photos using Picasa.