Monthly Archives: December 2009

Here is our 2009 Tagtool Christmas offering! We filmed it in our apartment during our recent skiing holiday in Livigno, Italy and Dima did the post production when we got home. We plan to email this video to all our friends with our best wishes for the New Year, so if you are reading this and you are not on our mailing list we would like send you also, every good wish for the New Year ahead – and lots of Happy Tagtooling in 2010!

The song which accompanies this animation is the 1989 single, ‘A Thousand Nights’ by the Swedish band Lädernunnan (The Leather Nun).

Here is Dima’s stop frame video made from footage shot during the first day of our filming in Amsterdam.

The soundtrack is from the album called Strømblocque Phantasieën by one of our favourite Dutch bands, Coolhaven – check them out at:-
www.coolhaven.nl
We have lots more footage waiting for Dima to work on – so I hope that ‘Room of Ghosts II’ – the sequel, will be coming soon!

Drawing in the very long narrow downstairs hallway presented quite a challenge. As the photos below show, I had to sit in a very small space directly behind the time lapse camera and the two projectors, which meant that I had a rather restricted view of what I was drawing.The ‘background’ for my drawing was some video clips of footage from one of our B+W 16mm films and it seemed a pity to draw over this illusion of stairs created by the projection on the floor of the hallway without taking a photo first.For some of the sessions in the hallway we used only the larger Panasonic projector mounted on its side, giving the portrait format that can clearly be seen in this photo that I took while Dima was setting up the computer ready for me to draw.A really strange contrast occurred between the process of drawing over the figure and creating the shadows, colours and patterns surrounding her. As most of the drawing area consisted of the sharply receding planes of the floor and walls, when I drew thin lines they became hugely elongated on the floor and short and wide on the walls, and describing a circle with my pen resulted in a narrow ellipse. However, this ‘difficulty’ enabled me to produce very quickly some really dramatic effects.

We used two locations for our Tagtool sessions; a very beautifully proportioned room on the first floor back of the ‘front house’ which, when the reconstruction was completed, would be the present owner’s sitting room, and the long, narrow downstairs hallway that ran from the front of the house right through to the very back of the ‘back house’ at the rear of the property.Preparations for filming in the first floor room.
Here is my Tagtool set up in the corner.  For the first session we used only one projector, trained on a very large white ‘flat pack’ three door wardrobe left behind by a previous owner. I began by drawing over some video footage of a swan on the canal provided by the director.We then repositioned the projector so that I could construct this ‘stage set’ which the shadowy image of the present owner could animate and from which the ‘ghosts’ of the previous occupants would emerge.
For the second session we used two projectors which enabled us to have two underlying videos.
The larger beam of the Panasonic projector covered the entire surface of the wardrobe while the smaller image from our BenQ projector enabled me to draw on the doorway and wall. First I prepared two images, the scary head appearing on the wardrobe and the romantic youth holding the swan on the wall behind.
This provided the backdrop for filming a ‘happening’ where the wardrobe would be totally destroyed (in the photos below it is Dima doing the destruction – a role he very much enjoyed!). When the wardrobe was flattened (in a cloud of dust) the scary head was transferred on to the wall alongside the romantic youth. I then ‘erased’ both images using the whole spectrum of Tagtool colours – and also managed to take these photos of the drama. Once the dust had settled (literally!) on this performance, I drew these heads, fading them to produce this ghostly audience.

Canadian film maker Demetri Estdelacropolis had seen our ‘Tales from the Attic’ in Rotterdam earlier this year and invited us come to Amsterdam to do some Tagtooling for the film, ‘Nearly Departed’, that he is making there.  The filming location was an historic canal house in the centre of the city, an enormous, beautiful and quite extraordinary building that is currently undergoing major reconstruction and restoration.  Filming was to take place in the evenings and at the weekend when the builders were not working.  It sounded like a great opportunity for us to work in such a prestigious location – and we were not disappointed!

Needless to say, we came home with lots of photos.  At various points when I wasn’t actively involved in drawing I used my little camera to take some images specially for this blog and as usual Dima also documented our Tagtool sessions.  He is making a stop frame video from his material but meantime I have selected some still photos to ‘set the scene’ for our work on this project. I will publish a selection in my next two postings.