Video Militia

People spend years perfecting their digital skills to make things look DIY and analog.  Director Bennet Pimpinella takes the other approach... actually scratching, painting, and altering by hand each frame for this Bloody Beatroots video "Romborama."  Here's a bit of the process in his own words:

I usually don’t watch the film I’ve dug up. I start scratching the single frames without knowing what’s on them. I use engravers, colours, burns, transfers… and I work on the frames for about a month and a half. The time needed for a 3 minute Super8.  Then I telecine it at home, i.e. I re-record the material in digital. This is where I discover what I have done for a month.

Romborama is the fruit of one day of shooting and two and a half months of scratching, torment, solitude, anxiety and inspiration…. To achieve the right degree of confusion.  I lacerated 15000 frames on a 35mm film.  Then I added letraset, colour and in the end I applied the screentones, used by designers to emphasize the colour contrast.

In Romborama, I illustrate a battle between me and “The Bloody Beetroots”. A clash of colours, beats and scratches!!  I have tried to produce, through obsessive and repetitive imagery, a generational film dominated by new electronica and two masked superheroes, expressing deep, instinctive passions.  The approach stems from the extroverted creativity of someone whose intention is never to separate communication from experimentation, using rhythm, density and elements from the past like human perception.  A film that “rips it up”…."