Handleman
A hand-cranked camera and projector, for Resolume
What it does
An FFGL effect for Resolume Arena and Avenue: SW Handleman. Before about 1927 a cameraman turned the camera by hand, eight frames to a turn, two turns a second if he was counting properly, and a projectionist turned the projector at the other end. Everything that makes old film look like old film follows from those two hands, so that's what this models, with a loop of film between them that neither can get far ahead of.
The camera's hand decides which instant each frame holds. When the cameraman hurried, the frames are closer together in the scene's time and the action drags; when he slowed, they're further apart and it rushes. The shutter is a fixed angle, so a frame cranked slowly was exposed for longer and prints lighter, and the action rushes as the picture brightens, as it does on real silent footage. The projector's hand decides how long each frame stays on the screen, and its shutter is geared to the handle, so the flicker against your display wanders with it.
The print is silver on a nitrate base and it's had a hard life. Orthochromatic stock is blind to red, so lips and skin go dark and skies go white; panchromatic sees what a modern black-and-white conversion does. Sepia toning colours only where there's silver, so the whites stay white, and a tint dyes the light, so the blacks stay black. The grain belongs to the frame and the scratches to the gate. Press Run Out and light gets into the roll: the picture fogs to white from the edges, blank cells follow, and the frame line crawls up the screen until you frame it off or the tail whips out of the gate. Press it again to thread a new roll.
- Two hands on two cranks, 8 to 24 frames a second: the camera's sets when each frame was exposed and how long, the projector's how long each stays on screen
- Motion that rushes and drags, and a picture that breathes lighter and darker with it, at the print's gamma
- One, two or three shutter blades at 45 to 315 degrees, geared to the projector's handle
- Orthochromatic or panchromatic stock; Colour, Black & White, Sepia, Amber, Blue and Green tints
- Grain per frame, correlated weave, scratches fixed in the gate, dust on the print, a hair, and Framing onto the frame line
- Run Out: fog to blank cells, then the frame line Rolling, Framed or Off the End, and a second press threads a new roll
- Universal macOS bundle and a Windows x64 DLL
Where it stands
v0.1.0, and early days. It's measured by an offline harness driving the plugin's own code on an Apple Silicon Mac, at two rasters and on Apple's software renderer, mostly by feeding it a picture that says in black and white blocks which display frame it was: with both hands still, 598 of 598 display frames show the picture a steady clock predicts; each hand alone moves only what it should, and the loop of film between them never runs past its bound; a frame's light rises with the camera's interval at a slope of 1.44 against the print's gamma of 1.40; the flicker's spectrum is the shutter's Fourier series to 2.3e-8; sepia keeps its density law to a millionth and the tints theirs to a ten-millionth; the stocks' weights read back out of the picture to four places; and Run Out ends in blank cells with a frame line of the published height, crawling a pull-down at a time. It catches ten models broken on purpose and a one-character sabotage of its own shader, and all 19 controls change the picture. It hasn't been loaded into Resolume on macOS yet; the fleet's own test host loads it and renders through it there. On Windows it loads, registers and renders in Arena 7.27.1 on software rendering (no GPU, no sound), with every control as declared, and passed all 9 of the fleet's checks three times, the last on the shipped download: with the grain, the wear and the hands held still, 12 and then 15 controls measurably changed the picture there and none read dead, while Crank Rate and the rare Hair were too close to call every time. How the hands wander, the grain, the fog and the tones' colours are numbers I chose, not measurements, the orthochromatic sensitivity is an assumed shape, and it's only been seen on Resolume's demo clips. The shutter flickers at 12 to 15 Hz on a flat field, gentlest at the defaults: mind anyone in the room who is sensitive to that. The macOS build is signed and notarised. There's a user guide, but no presets, browser demo or OpenFX port yet. Try it in your own rig before you trust it in a show.
Watch it running
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