making movies
Currently putting together a fairly grungy bit of film I'm quite enthused about, hence my ranting about it here. It's a piece on loss (I think) that's come together over around 9 months so far, though most of the work has been in the last fortnight.
It started out some time after I bought myself a digital dictaphone. The intention was to take notes, but to date that hasn't really happened. Instead I sporadically come up with fragments of (frequently rather sad) songs, any where from 20-90 seconds long. I have about 6 of these fragments now and had been looking for a use for them, but nothing came to me.
Similarly when I bought my camera it was with the intention of in some way recording the urban environment, and perhaps using the video capability to enhance my work on scripts. Again nothing much happened for a while, except for taking a few snapshots at family events, which have been pretty frequent this summer. But they have had the effect of helping me familiarise myself with the camera and build my confidence in using it. But beyond this, two unlikely incidents suddenly gave me a way in to making creative use of the camera.
First as well as snaps at a family gathering I had the chance to take a couple of shots of an interesting wall. It was nothing more at the time than local colour in the absence of opportunities to take other shots. A fortnight later I attempted to take a photo of the party walking down the street from behind. In itself this would have been a whimsical nothing, but I'd altered the settings on my camera and inadvertantly took about three seconds of film. I corrected the settings, and later erased the film, but there was something in the unplanned nature of what was shot that interested me. Somehow these two chance occurances worked together and inspired me, a little over a week ago, to start taking pictures around my flat.
So I did, and continue to do so, and have begun to venture out of the flat to the yard and the alley outside the flat. Around the middle of last week I began to assemble some of the still shots on iMovie, and once I'd figured out how to switch off the apalling Ken Burns effect, and control the length of time each image is displayed, my still movie began to look pretty good. I then realised something was missing and that my song fragments would complement the piece perfectly. In the absence of any other way to transfer the audio I can shoot video on my camera (with lens cap on or off, it doesn't matter) to record from the dictaphone. It means that the already compressed sound gets degraded a little more, but it's still intelligible, and the ramshackle quality works well. I transfer the video clip onto the Mac, add it to the movie, strip out the audio and then delete the video, leaving the audio under the remaining images. At the moment I have around three minutes of footage over two song fragments which about half that time. When it's finished the film will be around five minutes.
It started out some time after I bought myself a digital dictaphone. The intention was to take notes, but to date that hasn't really happened. Instead I sporadically come up with fragments of (frequently rather sad) songs, any where from 20-90 seconds long. I have about 6 of these fragments now and had been looking for a use for them, but nothing came to me.
Similarly when I bought my camera it was with the intention of in some way recording the urban environment, and perhaps using the video capability to enhance my work on scripts. Again nothing much happened for a while, except for taking a few snapshots at family events, which have been pretty frequent this summer. But they have had the effect of helping me familiarise myself with the camera and build my confidence in using it. But beyond this, two unlikely incidents suddenly gave me a way in to making creative use of the camera.
First as well as snaps at a family gathering I had the chance to take a couple of shots of an interesting wall. It was nothing more at the time than local colour in the absence of opportunities to take other shots. A fortnight later I attempted to take a photo of the party walking down the street from behind. In itself this would have been a whimsical nothing, but I'd altered the settings on my camera and inadvertantly took about three seconds of film. I corrected the settings, and later erased the film, but there was something in the unplanned nature of what was shot that interested me. Somehow these two chance occurances worked together and inspired me, a little over a week ago, to start taking pictures around my flat.
So I did, and continue to do so, and have begun to venture out of the flat to the yard and the alley outside the flat. Around the middle of last week I began to assemble some of the still shots on iMovie, and once I'd figured out how to switch off the apalling Ken Burns effect, and control the length of time each image is displayed, my still movie began to look pretty good. I then realised something was missing and that my song fragments would complement the piece perfectly. In the absence of any other way to transfer the audio I can shoot video on my camera (with lens cap on or off, it doesn't matter) to record from the dictaphone. It means that the already compressed sound gets degraded a little more, but it's still intelligible, and the ramshackle quality works well. I transfer the video clip onto the Mac, add it to the movie, strip out the audio and then delete the video, leaving the audio under the remaining images. At the moment I have around three minutes of footage over two song fragments which about half that time. When it's finished the film will be around five minutes.
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