Radical Cross Stitch

A little while back I was chatting to the Ninja and she told me about making stop animation clips to show WiP progressions of cross stitch projects. I thought this was a most excellent idea for a few reasons. Firstly, I’m a nerd and I like making films that are a bit different. My absolute favourite film maker of all time is Len Lye who pioneered the idea of directly manipulating the film itself to create wonderful visual effects.

This is my favourite piece:

Free Radicals: 1958. It’s one of his later films. But all the earlier ones are just as cool. I often used to pay a visit to the uni library and sit down for a watch when I needed a bit of time out and some inspiration. And while they’re cool to watch on youtube, watching on actual film is of course, very cool!

Secondly, I’m interested in ways to communicate to people just how slow cross stitch is as a craft. I am constantly explaining to people that my work usually takes months to complete and people are almost always surprised. And I suspect they wonder why I keep doing it… Without going into a big explanation – I’m saving that for another time – what I really enjoy about the slowness of cross stitch is the time it gives me to meditate on the subject I’m stitching about.

So anyway here’s my first animation attempt!

While this piece isn’t a very big one, I thought it leant itself well to the idea. I used iMovie to produce it and it was pretty easy to make. Although the software has changed since I last used it and I couldn’t figure out how to do a couple of things and just gave up trying..

Here’s two imbeds. First from Facebook cause I think it compressed nicer but that doesn’t work for a few people so the second is the youtube version.

Music of the Compuriddims EP on the most wonderful JaHtari Net Label.

This piece is part of a QR Code sequence I’ve been making for an upcoming show, and it’s next in the QRack series. More on that later.

I’d love to hear what people think!

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