Psych Out (1968) - and plans for more research

 Psych Out has everything 60s: psychedelics, music, big eyeliner, and most importantly, Jack Nicholson with a ponytail. I've already cited this film several times as an inspiration, and while it has many elements I'd like to draw from, its is not as experimental as some of the other films I've been referencing for my final film. As you can see, the poster is much more sexualised and sensational than the actual film, which from what I've seen is quite common for promotions at the time of films involving psychedelics and the hippie scene. 

The film itself starts off with an element that I'd like to try out more of soon, using found footage and pictures as the intro, contextualising the film historically but also playing with these smaller vignettes as a form. This film generally uses quite dark colours for this part, while in my own work I'd like to experiment with brighter colours and rather than using footage from the news and advertisements, so far I've been enjoying using clips from old documentaries, PSAs, and training videos. However, I think that to have more historical context on the 60s as a whole, as part of my research I will try and make a segment similar to this in my own style, using relevant news segments from the time. Already being a big Joan Didion fan, I've read her book The White Album, in which she chronicles what she deems to be the spirit of the 60s and the end of it. I've also been reading The Electric Kool Aid acid test by Tom Wolfe as research. 

In Tom Wolfe's book he recounts how the group he was with filmed their entire journey (and how the Beatles followed suit with Magical Mystery Tour). In this short video exploring found footage I will be looking to include techniques that they used, and attempt to recreate them myself. I also plan to use excepts from the books I've been reading and see how these can be incorporated.

I've already mentioned Psych Out's use of the kaleidoscope effect and I've tried recreating it once but definitely plan on making another attempt that is more accurate to the period. There have also been some videos online of people using crystals to refract the image through the lens as a practical effect that I want to try to see how this goes. There is also a similar technique that uses another kind of glass to blur lights at night, which would be useful since I'm planning on doing quite a bit of filming at night and would like to see what practical effects are possible in low light. Also mentioned before is psych out's use of projectors in some scenes. Using quite detailed visuals such as the lights shown here on the projector provides an interesting effect that can be quite separate from reality as is quite simple to recreate. As seen on the left, this kind of effect is carried over in one of the sex scenes, but while it looks much like the projector effect seen before I think it is more of an overlay. I'd like to see how I could create an effect like this from scratch. 

Rather than using found footage, maybe a combination of both would be interesting in my own experimentation. 

As I mentioned above, the use of practical effects is something I'm quite interested, in during one of the party scenes everything is soft and out of focus, with lights bouncing off of many beads and stones to create the kind of star effect seen in cartoons. I'd like to play around with this, as its something I've seen in older Hollywood films as well. In the documentary I'm still editing I did have one shot with the light bouncing off in this way, and I'd like to explore how this is possible when not using sunlight, and what materials would be best to bounce off of when doing this.