Bill Leslie

Collapsing Towers Slomo Shoot

Filming in the studio at KU with Phantom camera and a collection of building blocks I have cut from old roof beams. The idea was to build structures and catch them collapsing or falling. We soon found the most successful way to work was to hit the table from beneath to make the objects leap in the air and then collapse. Worked with undergraduates and with a friends some who is 16 and they all seemed to find this really engaging.

Also shot on the Phantom and Bolex at the same time (100fps compared to 64fps) to compare results.

Second 16mm Reversal film 'Objects Made Backwards'

16mm Reversal Film 2 from Bill Leslie on Vimeo.

I wanted to make something that could be moved in front of the camera, obviously by hand, but without any hands present. I made three long pieces that could slide back and forth by cutting MDF and coating it in plaster.

Jo came to my studio recently and saw the objects and said it was like they were 'made backwards' or with the camera in mind. That the movement brought out by the camera was somehow inherent in the objects themselves. They afford a particular type of action in front of the camera. This feels important!

3D Model

3D model (Arp) from Bill Leslie on Vimeo.

I have been exploring 3D scanning and animation, using the 3D scanner at Kingston University and Blender. The scanner is incredibly cronky for something so high tech - it only has one scanner that goes up and down while the object rotates so it misses anything concave or even flat and running perpendicular to the scanner. The technician told me that the ideal object would be a perfect sphere so I started playing around with forms that might be smooth and bulbous and that would return a good scan. After some touching up in Meshmixer I used blender to make the object rotate. I love the surreal smoothness of the rotation.

I also got the object printed so I could play around filming it

Hand-processed medium format photographs, taken with 8 second exposures in a darkened room.

I've been reading a lot about early photography of antiquities in the late 19th century. How the aura of the ancient and broken objects is doubled by the aura of the faded and scratched images. I made these in response. Showed them at a PhD seminar with mixed response. It was felt that the images were too clearly and uncomplicatedly referencing these old photographs or at least this idea of the aura. I think there's something to this, but it is interesting to see these objects recast in this way. They don't feel as successful as the 16mm works I've been making which arguably are doing a similar thing with the faux ageing of the film. I'm struggling to find stills interesting at the moment, everything is moving in the film and video work, how can stills compete?!

New Photos of recent sculptures shot with DSLR

Pieces of Wood

Pieces of Wood from Bill Leslie on Vimeo.

More finished piece using slomo camera. These objects were made with the particular ability of the Phantom to make things seem to float in space. I tried to make them 'allthewayround' with no top, bottom or sides. Soundtracked to Steve Reich's Music for Pieces of Wood - seemed right somehow.

Slomo tests

Falling from Bill Leslie on Vimeo.

Promising test footage, dropping and spinning objects with the Phantom Slow motion camera on its side.

Slow Motion Shoot

Shooting in the film studio at Kingston with a crew of Fine Art Undergraduates. One of several successful shoots. Here we're spinning little wooden objects that have no top or bottom and will hopefully seem to be floating in space.

16mm Reversal Film 1 from Bill Leslie on Vimeo.

First reverse processed film. There's less detail and more scratching than on the negative film due to the process. Showed this at my first PhD presentation on an old Bell and Howell projector I got on ebay for £30. There's something really exciting about showing the work like this that adds to the frenetic feel of the footage with all the scratches. love how black the blacks are. The presentation style seems to suit the media.

Darkroom Set Up

Darkroom set up in my studio.Reverse Processing. Buckets of developer, 2 bleaches water and fix, a red light, timer and 100w lightbulb for re-exposure. Easy!

16mm tests from Bill Leslie on Vimeo.

Negative test footage, shot on my new Bolex and hand-processed in the studio. Really exciting results.

The Really Precious Things

There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly;they will see it no better for going fast. And they will at last, and soon too, find out that their grand inventions for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, conquer nothing; for space and time are, in their own essence, unconquerable, and besides did not want any sort of conquering; they wanted using. A fool always wants to shorten space and time: a wise man wants to lengthen both. A fool wants to kill space and kill time: a wise man, first to gain them, then to animate them.

John Ruskin, Modern Painters Vol 3 1856

"The object is a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum: irreducable to its own pieces and equally irreducable to its outward relations with other things," Hatman The Quadruple Object p. 47

"Creatures of myth might dance before the mind, but in no way are they substances." Harman speaking of the problems with Leibniz in The Quadruple Object p18

"Even if the exact hue of red in my apple can also be found in a nearby shirt or can of spray paint, the colours will have a different feel in each of these cases, since they are bonded to the thing to which they belong" Harman speaking of Husserl in The Quadruple Object p11