film — Blog — B. RUTH CREATIVE

Lotte Reiniger has been a MAJOR influence on my work. Studying her inspiring silhouette animations lead me to create my own. Today's #GoogleDoodle honors Lotte Reiniger's 117th birthday and it's absolutely AMAZING! My heart is seriously overwhelmed by how magical this is. The behind-the-scenes piece was equally was delightful.

Brianna McGraw animating for "The Woman who Flummoxed the Faeries"

Stop-motion animation and creating paper silhouette puppets is seriously time consuming. I learned this while working on my Lotte Reiniger inspired senior thesis at Bennington College. During this time, I often referred to her book, "Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films" as my bible and it was. I designed and oversaw the building on a multi-plane animation station to create the project on.

The entire experience creating this piece was remarkable. I loved collaborating with fellow creatives and then spending day and night in my studio bringing these puppets to life.

A year and a half ago, I returned to Bennington and the first thing I needed to visit was my animation trick-table. School wasn't in session so I wasn't nearly as devastated that no one was utilizing my creation as I would have been had students been there. I still have my original design plans for this beauty and I know that when I have more spare time, I'll recreate it and devote myself to more projects like this one. One day...

Recently I had the privilege of spending a weekend at a film workshop, offered by The Filmmaker's Cooperative (NY) with one of my B. RUTH colleagues, Danny Boy O'Halloran. The From Salt to Screen: Handmade Emulsion on 16mm workshop hosted by Josh Lewis at Negativland was absolutely fabulous. Over the course of two days, we made our own 16mm film stock and shot it. We really went back to the roots of film as a medium and a science. It's wild to think that only 100 years ago, filmmakers were using a similar process and that now, it's almost extinct.

Day 1: Lewis had us weighing out chemicals, breaking up crystals and. combining the rights amount of potassium bromide with silver nitrate. The whole thing was like a Walter White chemistry lesson. We mixed a silver gelatin emulsion and coated it onto 16mm acetate. I loved the contraption Lewis designed and built for painting the emulsion on the film. I want something like it in my studio for when I'm painting onto 16mm. Everyone in the class did their best to coat the acetate with nice & even coats of emulsion. I brought the funk & painted polka dots and zig-zags.

Day 2: Our stock dried overnight so we loaded up the Bolex and went outside to film. With our handmade emulsion, we were able to shoot 24fps with a 1.4 f-stop. But seriously...1.4 f-stop! After exposing our film stock, we developed the negative, made a contact print and developed that.

Each step the film was being developed, we were really just hoping that an image would show up, that the hours we spent cramped with strangers in a small dark room was worth it because we had an image. And success! We had an image.