Production history around: liCe

This article will be going over how my film ‘liCe’ was made.

I was feeling a bit antsy to get a film done. ‘Bones of Tyche’ was my longest project in terms of production time, and it had caused the gap between my releases to widen way longer than I wanted. I want to make lots of little films, each exploring chance or an alternative idea in a different way each time. This large gap made it feel quite a bit scarier to just ‘make something’.

Especially since I cannot post Bones of Tyche for three months due to the Fluxus Museum exclusivity contract, it added to this squirmy feeling that I needed to get something out.

Then my wife let me know that a ‘Strawberry Moon’ was happening soon. It is “the name given to the full moon in June and is named after the harvest season of indigenous Americans because it appeared when wild strawberries were to be harvested”.

I really like the idea of an event out of my control dictating the topic, so I decided this would be the film. I bought 2 packs of strawberries, some strawberry jam, and started to scratch my head, thinking ‘what would I do for this film?’. And I scratched. And I scratched.

My head was so itchy. I thought for 2 days that it was really annoying, and was wondering whether I did not apply shampoo properly when I last showered. Then my wife came home, and pondered whether she had headlice. Ah ha. I dug through her hair, and yup, I found one.

At 8PM, and we were out looking for headlice treatment. Surprisingly our local small Sainsburys and Tesco both had treatments. When looking at the critters, I thought “you are my next film”.

The camera I used for this film was the x1000 version of the ‘Jiusion Digital Microscope’ which I bought all the way back in August of 2020.

I’ve used the equipment a bunch in the past. Weirdly, I put some posts online of a Pseudococcidae, which has been used a bunch by researchers in the field of crop protection because they are such a hassle. Yay science. I also just really enjoy entomology. Just being curious in general, really.

The microscope’s film function really sucks, so I instead took lots of photos which I stitched together instead. It felt similar to ‘After Images’ in a way. I really like how this method looks, at a lower framerate.

Other than the bug, I filmed some other scenes as well. I put the microscope camera all over me. I mean all over me.

Much like my other pieces, I am a part of the film. Subject, medium, and filmmaker. There is something really funny about the idea of microscopic exhibitionism.

I have thought about this a lot actually. The idea that ‘obscenity’ is one of those things that is context-dependent. A naked photo of someone, taken from space, is nothing. A nude photo, taken at a microscopic level, is nothing. Other cultures being shown shirtless is not considered NSFW, some people are fine with nudity as long as they cannot be identified. Medical images are fine… It is all just interesting. I have had too many drunk conversations trying to get to the bottom of what people consider ‘rude’. Anyway.

Having the lice on top of lots of shots of human flesh gives the feeling of an infestation too which is fun.

Since I had all the strawberries, I decided to use these as well. I like using remnants of ideas in my films, the legacy of an idea, or the idea of an idea surviving.

I really like how gross and meaty strawberries look close up. It makes you realise that it is organic matter. The lice are organic matter. You are organic matter.

I also looked at a dice pip. Since, in the catalogue, this is where ‘Bones of Tyche’ should be inserted, I wanted to have a note of that.

I included a drawing. It was made by me grapping a handful of pens at once and just scribbling.

I feel that it turned out really pretty. I like how thick the colours look, and how varied. It almost makes it look like pastels were squished down. With the lice on screen as well, it adds a sense of speed and movement.

I also took a close up look at a printed piece of advertising that was shoved through our door.

I love how printed stuff looks close up. That it is an illusion that tricks our eyes into seeing something else. My mom and dad both worked most of their lives at various printing companies, so I feel a particular fondness of looking into this.

Much like ‘Doggy Style’, this film is also an investigation into ‘animal’ based chance. A piece where I cannot really control what the subject is doing. They dictate a lot of what happens. I really found I was chasing the creature when filming. The area of the microscope which is being captured is really quite small, so if they walk at all, they are out the shot. I really like how this dynamic can be seen on the film.

When watching ‘liCe’, it really reminded me of experimental flicker films. I always find them quite meditative. They allow my thoughts to drift off quite easily.

I wanted to use a song by the same person who made ‘Eggistential’s audio. I went through the ‘RutgerMuller’ catalogue and decided on ‘Mugician_Synth_Jam_1_Ambient_.aif’.

I want to revisit people when I can when deciding on what to use. I like to see it as a silent collaboration, but I know some people are not a fan of that type of association, so I do worry about expressing it like that. I also see it as a chance limitation, having a purposefully restricted catalogue to choose from, that also strengthens a connection.

I like how serious and sombre the song sounds, like it is the end of the world because the bugs took over. My wife now says the song makes her feel itchy, which is cool.

Originally I chose to have the lice on a green piece of cardboard, so I could maybe chromakey them on top of different scenes. This failed because the zoom was too close, revealing just how uneven and chaotic cardboard really is on a microscopic level.

Regarding how many images there are in this 74 second film, there are 1187 images of the lice.

There are also 1120 images of other items.

Because the chromakey was a bust, I thought I would jump between shots of the lice and the other subjects. However, since there were accidentally a similar amount of photos, I decided to overlay both of the shots by making the lice layer transparent with no real cutting. All of the edits between shots were errors in Sony Vegas trying to run them sequentially. After watching it, I knew I wanted to keep it this way.

I would like to play with this method again at some point in the future. I am enjoying there being these ‘series’ of films: After Images, films of the dogs, etc. I like there being chunks of time between each iteration.

I am now lice free. Hopefully.