How I Made The End Credits For ‘No Needle, Just a Haystack’

One of the more elaborate features of my new film No Needle, Just A Haystack is definitely the end credits sequence.  Nick offered me the chance to premiere a new song of his in the film, so rather than just have the piece play over black or a static image, I decided to build the credits sequence around the song (the song, by the way, is My Dog's Eyes from the new Zammuto EP Veryone).  I'm been pretty interested with VHS tape degradation for a while, so I decided to play around with the concept.  My inspiration and starting point was an experimental film I saw in college, which I unfortunately cannot recall the title or filmmaker - the film was made up of a series of random shots, optically printed again and again (each time losing a generation of quality) until all that remained was a flurry of white flashes over black.  I figured I could do something similar by dubbing shots onto a VHS tape, digitizing them and then dubbing them again.

I ended up opting to shoot my computer screen with my trusty VHS camcorder (given to me by animator Evan Curtis), rather than dubbing onto a VHS tape - this was a lot easier and sped up the process of degradation.  In the end, I shot, captured and reshot the sequence around twelve times.  Once I had the footage captured I realized that there was quite a bit more that I could do with it (beyond just having the shots go from the originals to the fully degraded shots) - using the luma key tool I could remove the darker parts of the image and overlay them over the originals, creating an interesting, ghostly effect.