Lye continued to develop new kinds of “direct film” (films made without a camera). In ‘Color Cry’, his first major American film, he found a striking new way to use Man Ray’s rayogram or shadow cast process, arranging a variety of fabrics and stencils on strips of film. Strips of film with sprocket holes were also used as stencils. Lye synchronised his film to some haunting music by blues-singer Sonny Terry, which he imagined to represent the anguished cry of a runaway slave.