The 13th of March marked our first video test with the microscopes, with our own items to be specific. Prior to this day, I went to ASDA and picked up 4 small bottles of food colouring (Red, Blue, Orange, and Green), and in my home, I poured some Vegetable Oil into a small bottle for safe transportation, and also brought a strange little Nurofen syringe thing, in order to ‘extract’ and ‘expel’ the liquids with finesse. I thought that all of these could work exceptionally well under a microscope. It could look like a psychedelic light show during a Pink Floyd performance in the late ’60s, if done right. The ‘equipment’ I brought (except for the oil) should be pictured below:
With these in hand, our group booked the microscope room and headed in. Between the two microscopes in the room, we spent more time looking through the black microscope, as it was much more powerful and allowed us to have a much closer look at things. The other grey and blue microscope wasn’t as good for getting really close up looks at things. We also found a couple of coloured gels that could be applied to the stronger of the two microscopes, but that comes into play a little while later. We screwed Jacob’s camera onto the top of the microscopes, through the use of an adaptor of sorts that was placed above both telescopes, which allowed us to be able to film anything we placed under the microscope. Due to the slight visual differences (i.e. colour, focus, positioning) between looking at screen on his camera and looking directly through the microscope as normal, we had to pay more attention to how the camera perceived it, rather than relying on looking through the microscope and hoping that the camera would record the visuals exactly as you saw it (???). We spent a while looking at other assorted things they had in drawers and boxes within the microscope room before we moved onto the liquids. I don’t believe any of these (bar one exception, some type of nerve or something) were filmed.
Eventually, we got around to the liquids. What we were doing was very dangerous and risky, and we most definitely should not have been doing anything like that, but we did it anyway, as discreetly as we could manage (not very discreetly at all). We decided to get a small slide to ‘expel’ our liquids onto, but we didn’t even have anything to cover it up, such as a second slide on top of it. It was simply a splattering of loose liquid on top of a slide that could have easily slipped off of the slide and into the inner workings of the microscope, especially when we began incorporating oil into things, which would’ve been an exceptionally horrifying thing to happen, but we got lucky, and I’m getting very ahead of myself.
Anyways, Luis took the role of ‘alchemist’, and he used the Nurofen syringe thing to extract the food colouring from the bottles, and then expel them onto the slide. This was something he had to get used to, however, as we quickly discovered that towards the end of the ‘expulsion’ period, no matter who slowly you pushed down, the device would snap downwards, and so it created a large mess of splattered food colouring all across the slide and table, which was real nice. We cleaned up using a bunch of tissues we gathered and proceeded. Luis managed to mix a few food colouring colours onto the slide, by squirting one colour on one part of the slide, and then squirting another either beside it or within it. We tested these mixes on both microscopes. The weaker grey and blue microscope failed to make these mixes look in any way impressive, so we moved onto the stronger black microscope, and the results were significantly better than we expected.
The closer image gave the food colouring a very spacey and layered look to it. You could see bubbles of varying sizes moving around and on top of each other, ‘strands’ of colour creating strange patterns, and so on. It looked rather amazing. Some colours came out better than others, however, as the green and, to a larger extent, the blue looked rather weak and was barely noticeable compared to the strong and vivid appearances of red and orange. We experimented with those gels that we found earlier, and some of those allowed the colours, especially the green and blue, to stand out much more. At times, we decided to blow on the slides (very carefully, of course) to create some sort of motion. We sometimes blew to a heartbeat like rhythm, because we thought of pairing some (or all, considering that we’d be playing multiple things at the same time) of the film to the sound of a heartbeat. We also changed filming modes and settings, such as aperture, resolution, and importantly, frames per second. We thought that if we filmed on a higher frame rate (which could only be done in 720p on Jacob’s camera, rather than the default 1080p 25fps we mostly used), we could perhaps slow down some of our footage in post-production, but we eventually thought that the food colouring ‘moved’ slowly enough normally, that we didn’t really need to bother raising the FPS. If anything, we probably needed to speed up the video to make the movement stand out more.
We later decided to add some oil to the mix, dropping some here and there around the slide, sometimes next to the food colouring, and sometimes within it, to create a sort of separation from the inside. Despite the oil being a very vivid urine-like colour, it did not appear that way through the microscope, simply appearing clear. The first attempt went well for a little while. The oil created imagery within the food colouring that made things look like huge planets in a colourful psychedelic space, or something like that. Frighteningly enough, the amount of oil placed on the slide was a little bit too much, and considering that the oil wasn’t mixing with the food colouring, and was placed in the middle of the slide with food colouring surrounding it, it meant that while we were looking at the camera and recording, the oil began to spread out within the slide, pushing away all of the food colouring surrounding it off of the slide, while it was above the very delicate and very expensive microscope. We quickly managed to prevent the very expensive accident that may have occurred just in the nick of time. We very quickly learned that we needed to apply much less oil to the slide, as well realising where to place the oil to avoid seeing the consequences of oil’s territorial nature.
The later attempts with oil went very smoothly, and we managed to create some even more exceptional visuals, with imagery that looked akin to bacteria, cells, very unnaturally coloured rivers, planets, and so on. We were very pleased with the results. We eventually cleaned up all of the mess made from creating the various slides (and there was a significant amount of mess, that was, thankfully, easily cleaned away), and finished off for the day. We filmed a heap of footage, probably more than necessary, but what we had looked brilliant. I’m not sure how these visuals fit into the theme of transformation or cause and effect, but it looks too good for me to really care. I’m sure that, if paired with the mirrors, these visuals could look amazing magnified and fractured around an entire wall. We definitely could’ve handled the creation of these slides with more finesse and care than we did, as we potentially could’ve made a huge mess and damage to property and equipment rather easily if we weren’t careful, and even then, we shouldn’t have been doing this work in the microscope room at all, due to the many risks involved. If we do this again and get some more footage, we definitely have to approach it with much more caution than we did.
Transcendence 