Direct link to YouTube video: Solstician Rain
The light was beautiful, but ripe, fruity, dense, as if walking through a film in technicolour. Light swimming to us through veils of vapour high up, some particles clear, others refracted. Colour magnified. Air, rich. The streets a vision under a distant roar of stratospheric surf. Then it poured.
The woman I passed saw the light, its ominous hush, picked up an umbrella on her way out. I didn't.
We, my dog and I, stood under a tree cover while thunder broke its drums.
We weren't slicked and soaked by the time we reached home, only dampened with large drops: she, smelling of happy wet dog; me with my khaki green long soft Indian cotton skirt, spotted, juiced.
_
'Solstician Rain' is a description of my walk yesterday evening. An hour or so after getting caught in the rain, I went out and recorded the video. It was dark by then but with various filters I was able to achieve something resembling the feel of the atmosphere earlier. Holding a microphone out of the window, I recorded the rain and thunder. Working in Final Cut Express, I layered video and audio tracks to form this videopoem. I love the rich fertility of this time of year.
The music under the thunder is by AlFa. It's approximately the first two minutes of an eighteen minute piece, 'Poème de la forêt,' from their album, Nuance Khaki, Fiber Lily, which carries a Creative Commons license and may be found here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/10688.
Here is a screen capture of this video in Final Cut Express.
Click for a larger size.
enchanting as usual Brenda, the words, the sound effects, the sound of thunder all evoke vividly a summer storm for me.
ReplyDeleteGosh, Boris, you are sweet! The video doesn't fully work for me, but I got trapped in it, you know how it is, and then everything was connected to everything else, different video layers & filters, different sound layers, titles, etc., and I wasn't going to video again earlier in the evening when lighter because that would be starting over! Rendering each change takes forever (that's where the long hours go, waiting, making a small change, waiting endlessly, shifting something, waiting, waiting for the d**m thing to render again before you can see what you're doing). Eventually I'll get better at producing these little videopoems! Thanks for your support, I so appreciate it. xo
ReplyDeleteI just read my comment. It's not that I don't like it. :-)
ReplyDeleteBut that rendering, oy! Because I had so many filters on some of the visual layers, it could take up to an hour to render, and then, and only then could I 'see' the tiny change I'd made. Each change required the patience of a cat.
One could knit a sweater in the time it takes to produce a 2 minute video! Or maybe write a novel. Cook a five course meal. The possibilities are endless.
The only thing one cannot do is sleep. That's why we stay up all night like maniacs.
::grinning::
very nice, brenda, i get this sense of innocence, perhaps it is in the voice, that childlike, joyous, yet always sensuous voice of yours that never fails to bring down the rain in me. :>>))
ReplyDeletelove the sounds, the summer sounds, the spontaneity... the thunder on my machine masked your voice for a few seconds which might just be brought down a little in the mix sweetening...
i loved the video, it was an unfolding of dark and the remaining light... it was dark, as you tell us, so the video works perfectly after your intro... another great moment from the goddess... all love, all live! ~lt
ps. such a COOL verification word: "prewave"... wow. maybe a poem?
What a sweet little gift to find when I returned to my computer after a busy day! Thank you, Laura, for your lovely comment.
ReplyDeleteI did play a little with the voice & the thunder and when the voice was louder the thunder didn't strike as clearly but was muffled and indistinct so I left it the way you hear it thinking that the writing is by the video & so one could read what the thunder-masqued words are...
I've been sort of wrangling most of the day with another video of some women dancing at DOWH's Summer Solstice session, bits of the media kept inexplicably going off line, and when I picked the prosepoetry reading (of a number of tries) there was a glitch in it but I left it allowing the imperfection. The original clip and my edited version are waiting at Vimeo to be processed, a site where you may re-upload an edited video without losing your url or play count, and so perhaps I'll have a bath, relax for a bit...
Many thanks, sweetie xoxo
And, yes, write a "prewave" poem!
imperfections allowed, brenda! i have tons of them... :>>))
ReplyDelete