5.29.11 My Lover, I Love Ya

My first installment of HD video. I have a love/hate relationship with HD in the sense that it really does look nice and clean and crisp and wonderful, but it also is sterile. One of my least favorite things is that everyone shoots in HD now and it seems like everyone knows everything about getting the best image quality out of a piece of footage. But there's no character, no texture to the picture. I like being able to actually see the video, not just the image the video is capturing. I like the degradation of video tape, it lets me know that it's representing something, not try to fool me into believing that thing is right in front of me. I like the suspension of disbelief, the bit of curtain pulled back on the wizard. HD is a mask without a curtain, albeit a beautiful mask.

My Lover, I Love Ya from Hettie Kauffman on Vimeo.

5.22.11 American By Birth

A little late but here nevertheless. 4 minute video: American By Birth. Well outside my comfort zone, can't say I've ever made a video like this before, both in physical content and in contextual subject matter. It's a little more narrative than I usually attempt. At any rate, I was trying to combine elements of advertising, war, and immigration from Mexico. Oh how we love our intrusive and obnoxious advertising, to the extent that we're constantly giving away information to companies to better equip them to sell to us. But show some compassion for our fellow humans in our neighboring country to the south? NIMBY. It makes me sad and angry, and we wont even get into America's warring tendencies.

American By Birth from Hettie Kauffman on Vimeo.

Shot with a Sharp VL-WD450 which I'd never used before. It has a night vision function called Super Cat's Eye which turns the picture black and white but let's it produce an image in very low light. Then there's also an IR switch that lets you shoot in zero light (again in b+w). It was pretty fun, crawling around the floor in the dark with a bunch of toys fit for boys. In reality though, I probably spent the most time on the audio in this piece just trying to slow the tape player enough to make my voice sound close to an army dude. Lots of trial and error.

Also, now that it's technically Monday as I'm typing this entry, I rolled the die for this weeks video.

2 minutes it is

I'm back. And I've figured out how I'm going to make this thing work. Not only was I getting frustrated with the uploading process, I have to say I was also lamenting my chosen project idea. 1 minute of footage a day was a lot harder than it sounded. Not because it wasn't possible, but more so because it was limiting. I found myself trying to make finished works that were a minute long which was really not what the idea was about. It was supposed to be about gathering materials and always shooting footage. As I soon found out, that tended to feel more like a waste of time and resources when there was no foreseeable outcome. And so, I was try to complete ideas or thoughts or investigations in under a minute, and every day. It was exhausting in many ways- and while I'd like to think this was the only creative project I have going on, I find it's more of the third or fourth. So I've scaled it back a bit and maneuvered things to feel more rewarding for myself (and hopefully anyone else that sees these videos). On Mondays I'll roll a die to determine the length of the week's video (1-6minutes). On Sunday, I'll upload the finished product. This way, times will vary and so I can use/play with that aspect, and I won't be driving myself crazy everyday trying to finish things for the sake of finishing.

I started back up this week and rolled a four on Monday.

see you on Sunday...