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How I learnt to stop worrying about landscapes and love The One Show

So when I began making my short films, the first thing that I had to get my head around was taking that leap from the portrait orientation of the vast majority of my photographic work to the landscape and widescreen format of video and cinema.

It was something I hadn't really thought about and during my first video shoot I suddenly realised that there was now all of this other blank space to consider to the left or the right of the subject.  Turning the camera on a right angle gave me the shot I wanted though sadly this is an impractical way to shoot a film as it demands an audience tilts their own head to a similar degree to fully enjoy the experience. 

I think that this is a bit too much to ask, so begrudgingly I find myself shooting films "the right way up", though often these long rotated shots do make an appearance in my work as a little reminder to myself.

It's something I am comfortable with now, but to begin with I seriously toyed with the idea of shooting film lengthwise in this way and displaying them rotated into portrait on my website.  I shot some test scenes like this and worked out the mechanics to get the whole thing functioning, but it somehow seemed inauthentic to jump through all of these hoops to get this end result.  The issue also arose of distribution away from disappointedvirginity.  This method made cinema and DVD screenings more difficult (not impossible, but involving lots of dead space on either side of the film) so I laid the idea to rest but never completely forgot about the concept.

A couple of years somehow managed to disappear without me really noticing and on a particularly non descript evening I found myself sitting down to eat dinner.  In an uncharacteristic move, I was in front of a television set which was filling my eyes with the über mundane output of BBC's "The One Show" and somehow I resisted the temptation to stab myself in the face with cutlery. It's a good job I did as one of the features was a brief piece on the late nineteenth century Peepshow machines.

In case you might not know about these, they consisted of a large cabinet containing hundreds of sequential photographs which the viewer would observe by peering through a lens and turning a handle to provide motion, similar in concept to how a flick-book works.

The photos in these cabinets covered a range of subjects, but as with many new mediums became popular due to the adult content that became to be increasingly available.  Of course, by today's standards, the images were exceedingly tame, but at the time caused a scandal, as demonstrated by a letter in The Times newspaper from 1899 that deemed them: "vicious demoralising picture shows. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the corruption of the young that comes from exhibiting under a strong light, nude female figures represented as living and moving, going into and out of baths, sitting as artists' models etc. "

Watching this brief segment was something of a Eureka! moment for me.  I had been using javascript slideshows to add movement to my work presented on the web for some time, generally as a looping display of a series of images with a five second pause in between each one(as displayed on the front page of disappointedvirginity), but what if I used the same code to rapidly display a sequence?

I wasn't sure if this would work.  Maybe the required speed would be too fast for browsers to deal with.  Maybe the loading times for so many photos wouldn't provide the smooth movement I needed?

Deciding that there was only one way to find out I arranged a test shoot with my friend the burlesque performer Liberty Sweet.  I didn't want to go to the trouble of planning out a full on disappointedvirginity scenario, so suggested that she come over and perform  one of her routines that I would attempt to capture in this way.  And so, these 850 images displayed here were shot that day over a short period of time.

For a first attempt, things went pretty well.  With my finger held on the auto-shutter release, she performed her routine in small segments, whilst I repositioned the camera every 50 photos or so to provide different angles.

The tricky part was then making this work.  The following day and via a cracking hangover as we had decided to go out and get smashed after all our hard work, I sat down with my coders hat on and put together a script to display the images.  Just to reiterate, these are not animated GIFs as some people have assumed and are in fact JPEGs displayed in rapid succession.  This offers a few advantages.  Not only is the file size much smaller, to speed up loading times and ensure a smooth running, but I am also able to specify the order in which the clips are shown.  As an example of that, it enables me to display images one to twenty, then twenty to one creating a seamless loop and then play images one to forty on the third cycle before repeating the whole process  - creating  the opportunity to add little surprises rather than straight repetition.

I have produced short animated gifs of the final versions, for display on other sites that aren't able to integrate the necessary java script to have them working correctly, but these are cut down imitations of the intended work - bless them for trying.

But anyway, it worked.  The finished scene isn't really a part of the disappointedvirginity world, but as a proof of concept I was very pleased with the outcome.  I booked in a few more shoots to further experiment with the technique, the first of which resulted in nine separate animations (which I had by now christened "mutoscopes" even though the term isn't wholly accurate as a description...) of the model playing with her breasts, shot from different angles.

I presented these in a 3x3 grid format (which is how all future mutoscopes have been laid out) with the middle image being just the model, still and looking back at her audience with some contemptuous "Yes, I'm playing with my breasts?  What of it?" accusatory glance.

This provided too much movement and I found myself almost seasick watching these 18 breasts sloshing and tumbling about my monitor.  Despite this overwhelming display, I was drawn to the serenity of the central image.  The small involuntary movements, the intake of breath, the unconscious blinking and licking of the lips...

It was then more or less that I cemented what I was doing with this new technique and the work that followed has largely consisted of smaller subtle movements, living portraits rather than scenes.  As these need to loop, backwards and forwards to remain seamless, they require repetitious movement, which luckily enough lends itself quite nicely to sexuality and erotic suggestion.  Sometimes the scene may as well just be a breathing photo and other times I have played with some more overt ideas of masturbation or simulated acts of various degrees of deviousness. 

Taking the idea forward, I have been thinking about shooting a short film as a series of photos in landscape orientation and importing these into my video editing software to animate in that way.  A few test shoots have occurred and the idea works, although places further limitations on what I can shoot and generally makes things a little trickier all around. 

But that's okay, these little challenges keep things interesting, keep me out of mischief and keeps me from ever having to watch "The One Show" again - although who knows what it might inspire in me next?