Video

The rooms that house these objects are in themselves so stunning that  I  liked the idea of showcasing them too, as once again the way the windows are dressed , the colours on the walls, the arrangement of furniture all reflect the identity of the house owners.

My first attempt at video was rather unsuccessful. I like the rough grainy feel of the low resolution filming but quickly realised any panning was out of  the question. Although delightful, gregarious characters, Carol and Roger were not initially comfortable in  front of the camera. However as Carole got into the swing of things she was a natural and had a lovely fluency. 

Another issue I discovered while filming with the Canon 5D was that the sound recording was of a very poor  quality so I therefore did the rest of the recorded dialogue with the superior Marantz recorder. The exception to this was a couple of clips with Carol on her own when she was more sure of herself.   

I played about with the idea of 'still video' panoramas of the rooms so that the viewer had time to explore the magnitude of the collections. I found however that they just looked like photographic stills and so didn't really work.

The next experimentation was to shoot these 'video stills' with the smallest, most subtle of movements, a sun reflection, a curtain blowing, a toys monotonous waving action. Fortunately the day I tried this out was particularly sunny and windy and as I moved around the house I could see more and more opportunities to produce some form of movement. This has given me the feel to the video work that I was searching for. I have left a few stills in the video as it adds a touch of expectation as to what if anything will occur next.

Video Editing

I have edited the video using iMovie. My experience with video editing has been extremely limited so far and so this has been an interesting challenge especially with the overlayed sound. 

First draft

The first video I did lasted for a total of 15minutes. When it was viewed to others I realised that the attention span of most  viewers was probably nearer  5-6 minutes so I have had to drastically edit it. I had inserted lots of stills to break up the video pieces and had overlayed music over the dialogue. The music was deemed to be too distracting due to the volume and variety of music scores.

 Latest draft

I have now managed to edit the latest video down to 6 1/2 minutes including titles. I have only one soundtrack on a small piece of the video.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the editing process and I will look at Finalcut- pro for my next project to give me more scope, although i-movies enabled me to tackle everything I wanted to do with this particular piece.

The video had been put on youtube and has links from the website.

Youtube:  STUFF - Creating an identity

Magnum Video podcasts

I have viewed many of the high quality Magnum podcasts in an attempt to get some guidance and inspiration.

Iranian memoir is a particularly haunting podcast  photographed in black and white and colour,  by an American-Iranian. It is beautiful in its simplicity, images fading gently from one to another.