Click on the image above or one of these: Quicktime | Flash
Here I go again attempting to make something out of material gathered with no particular purpose in mind. Under other circumstances I’d have used a tripod and locked the shot, but the nine still images which make up this presentation were taken hand-held. The presentation itself was created in minutes, completely in iPhoto.
The location is Norfolk Street in Belmont, a district of Port of Spain, Trinidad, where I was last night taking photos and video of the La Fantasie Art project. I selected the building mainly because it was directly across the street and because of the glow from two fluorescent light fixture which highlighted the texture of the metal door, but it also happens to be the constituency office of the People’s National Movement, the ruling political party of Trinidad & Tobago.
This also happens to be my submission for Semanal - Week 4!
Quicktime | Flash
More video from my 2006 India trip. This one’s really just a slice of life, and a slice of tourist life at that. Nikipedia and I had every intention of riding an elephant up to Amber Palace. But on actually arriving at Amber and seeing that the walk up the hill takes all of five minutes, plus learning that getting to the elephant terminus involved walking some distance away from the Palace, we decided to hoof it instead. Viewed up close, it also seemed just too much of a touristy thing to do.
Which didn’t stop me from filming tourists riding elephants. The faintly audible voice pointing out that most of the elephants are female is Nikipedia’s.
We did end up getting a chance to interact with elephants, however, as Tabu, our Jaipur driver, took us to visit an elephant compound in the middle of a village off the Amber Fort Road.
Quicktime | Flash
I recently signed on as a member of an initiative called Semanal, where the goal is to produce 52 videos for the year (ie one per week), so it seems like I’m now sort of committed to this video thing. Which gave me the impetus to turn the footage I shot on that achingly gorgeous day at Mount St. Benedict into something.
I beg you, therefore, to view this one more as an exercise in creating a narrative of sorts out of material shot without any particular purpose in mind, and in playing with mood and atmosphere, rather than trying to discern any meaning (there isn’t any). It was also the first real test of the Aiptek GO-HD camcorder, which, like most cameras of its ilk, yields the best shots in good light and when the camera is held still. And next time I promise I’ll take along a tripod.
Thanks to Nikipedia, Jonty, André, Alison Allyson and the waitress at the Pax Guest House for participating (albeit involuntarily). The soundtrack was borrowed from here.Click here to join Semanal.(”A Feather in his Cap” was previously uploaded elsewhere under the title “A Murder on the Mount”).
Quicktime | Flash
I’ve never been one for new year’s resolutions, but if there’s one goal I have for 2008 it’s to make peace with online video. Having spent a good part of my professional life working in television, I’ve got plenty of prejudices about quality etc. to rid myself of. In fact, I strongly believe that one of the reasons I was able to embrace audio so freely is that I’ve never worked in radio.
So brace yourself for a season of bad CFR videos as I teach myself to shoot (as opposed to telling somebody else to shoot) moving pictures, edit (as opposed to sitting with my hotshot editor brother and watching him push the buttons) and play with various methods of compression and presentation while savouring the limitations imposed on me by bandwidth and my reluctance to impose too much on the patience and goodwill of my viewers.
I recently invested in a small, cheap Aiptek GO-HD
camcorder, but the video below was filmed on the Panasonic still camera I took with me to India last year. The footage sat there for a year, until, inspired by some of the things the Egypt group were doing with their little camcorders, I decided to sit down a few weeks ago and hack it into something. It’s a little over six minutes, which is a long time to be looking at footage shot from the side of an auto-rickshaw, but it’s got a nice soundtrack and a few interesting images here and there. So why not pop a Dramamine and take a look?
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