I organised a test shoot with the two crew members, Alex and Callum, who had agreed to help out on my shoot. I have worked with both of them before and this was a really fun filming session.

I had collected a fish tank, salt water, glycerin, corn syrup, acrylic paint, ink, glitter, and some syringes that come with a popular brand of children’s liquid paracetamol. I have filmed (and photographed) some ink dropping into water a few time before but this had always been very representational, it looked like ink dropping into water, here I wanted something more abstract.

I want to try and recreate the lighting from some of the planetary images taken by probes such as voyager. After studying a few of the images it seemed that a hard light source as far away from the tank as possible would be the starting point. I thought the softness was probably coming from the atmosphere scattering the light which would likely happen in the water.

While I mixed the ingredients Callum took charge of camera with Alex providing production duties, including taking the detailed notes that I often forget once I get invested in experimentation.

After a few tests adding salt and glitter to the tank to check focus I injected a milky consistency of a acrylic paint into the salt water, this produced some interesting blooms initially and the cloud like swirls as it settled.

We tried to let the camera role until the movement stopped completely as often the gentle swirls were more interesting once the water started to settle.

My initial inspiration for these images was marbling so I had got hold of some (washable not oil) marbling inks, but these just floated on the top of the salt water. We tried adding the corn syrup, this did aid the mixing but the sugars started to crystallise and it quickly became hard to work with.

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We were about to clean the tank when Alex walked in front of the light, Callum spotted that the by narrowing the angle of light further it created some really dramatic effects.

After a difficult tank clean, sugar and yellow ink crust, Callum suggested trying the close-up adapter that he had for the 200mm lens we were shooting with. As well as the white acrylic I also added some black drawing ink this time. With the close-up lenses shallow depth of film this produced some really soft dreamlike images, some of which looked really cosmic.

Although this was only intended as a test shoot there was some really useful images captured, I have edited these into the audio sequence that I created to get some feedback last week. That feedback was really mixed regarding the synthesised voice with a number of people feeling it was difficult to follow due to the monotonous pacing. I am going to work with it a bit further before moving away from it as I don’t have another direct for the voice over at the moment. I have another day of filming planned next week where I going to work with the glycerol further, the higher viscosity meant that it didn’t ‘slosh’ as much in the tank creating more stable images, the corn syrup worked much the same way but the added cleanup time was not great.