Amsterdam Tagtool sessions – part 1

We used two locations for our Tagtool sessions; a very beautifully proportioned room on the first floor back of the ‘front house’ which, when the reconstruction was completed, would be the present owner’s sitting room, and the long, narrow downstairs hallway that ran from the front of the house right through to the very back of the ‘back house’ at the rear of the property.Preparations for filming in the first floor room.
Here is my Tagtool set up in the corner.  For the first session we used only one projector, trained on a very large white ‘flat pack’ three door wardrobe left behind by a previous owner. I began by drawing over some video footage of a swan on the canal provided by the director.We then repositioned the projector so that I could construct this ‘stage set’ which the shadowy image of the present owner could animate and from which the ‘ghosts’ of the previous occupants would emerge.
For the second session we used two projectors which enabled us to have two underlying videos.
The larger beam of the Panasonic projector covered the entire surface of the wardrobe while the smaller image from our BenQ projector enabled me to draw on the doorway and wall. First I prepared two images, the scary head appearing on the wardrobe and the romantic youth holding the swan on the wall behind.
This provided the backdrop for filming a ‘happening’ where the wardrobe would be totally destroyed (in the photos below it is Dima doing the destruction – a role he very much enjoyed!). When the wardrobe was flattened (in a cloud of dust) the scary head was transferred on to the wall alongside the romantic youth. I then ‘erased’ both images using the whole spectrum of Tagtool colours – and also managed to take these photos of the drama. Once the dust had settled (literally!) on this performance, I drew these heads, fading them to produce this ghostly audience.