While working on my cameraless film I took very simple approaches and tried adding my own complexities and methods. I worked exclusively with one extended piece of film from an old war movie. The scenes I chose, soldier staring and a flag waving, allowed for me to work with scenes that were darker and lighter. This produced several different results. I did two main things which was scratching and the coloring. Scratching was the first step across the entire forty second clip. I used an exacto knife, sand paper, metal scrub and a nail file. All of these methods led to very different looks and I found that the overall scratch quality and depth varied between each one. I found that the nail file was great for clean lines on a smaller area and the metal scrub was great for depth and clear damage. When it comes to colors, I tried all kinds of fun methods. Prior to much of anything I soaked the entire film in sweet tea vodka for a day. This gave it a strange darker tone and made the emulsion very sticky.
I put it outside to dry where it got covered in all kinds of earth Some of these dirt and grass marks can be seen on the final film. After drying and then cleaning to get, most of, the sticky off I went to work on color. I used acrylic paint which did not show up much outside of a shadow. I found that sharpie markers worked great for clean vibrant colors. I found that dripping a paper towel in water, coloring on it with the sharpie, making it wet again then applying to the film left this amazing water color look. You can see an example of that below in the first screenshot. This weird mix of green and blue came out great. A lot of the red came from dousing it in fake blood. The color is bright and it showed up great! Overall, I found that scratching before applying color, letting it dry and then rescratching is a great method to add depth to the film. Layers of color can be added using this method and it came out great! Two screenshot examples are below!
