The Wall at Moving Poems

Thank you, Dave Bonta, for featuring The Wall at Moving Poems on September 7th!

Yes, I embedded his webpage in my blog post. And, not only is the videopoem playable here, but I just left a thank you note for him via this embedded page and it appeared over there simultaneously. Personally, I think it's very cool.

(If you have an email subscription or are on an RSS feed like Google Reader or whatever, you'll have to click in to the post to see this beauty.)

Moving Poems

                              

Joani Paige at Free Times Cafe

direct link: Joani Paige at Free Times Cafe

Joani Paige, singing "So Fine," with Willie Anicic on harmonica near the end, and Pat Kelly on percussion (not in camera range) at Free Times Cafe on September 16, 2011.

Brenda Clews: camera and video editing. Yes, I took my camera and then spent the greater part of the weekend video editing.

You'll see that around 3:39min, the mask is apparent. The musician leans down out of it and into the light. If you didn't recognize the masking all the way through, you would at that point. It is obvious. I left it in to show the artifice in the art.

Here is a photograph showing my Final Cut filters, and you can see I manually keyed in the lights, their opacities, which took forever. To make sure that you see Joani throughout, I created another layer of her track and masked it. In the photograph, you can see there is yet another track where Willie is also masked.

A theme of masks seems to be running through my work, and this type of masking is yet another dimension to it.

A mask that lets you see the person who is being masked.


click on image for larger size
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Colors courtesy of Free Footage on Vimeo, with thanks.

                              

On Dancing Masked in the Tangled Garden

Look, perhaps I am outrageous, but at my age, seriously. I can do anything. Besides, I'm masked. And, anyway, my daughter was chaperoning me.

From a video shoot in High Park in June.

All this will be obscured in a long videopoem of three nature poems that is 22 minuters long that I may finish one day.



An early version of the central poem in Tangled Garden.

The little prancing figure in the background is what I would like to re-do, and I have footage, just so much work. And either re-recording the soundtrack or cleaning it up, so much work. It's been sitting on my hard drive for months. I'm trying to get back to it by giving myself just one small task to do. Last night I cleaned up the poetry track you hear here, which took hours, but should I record it again, or, if you know me, another dozen times before I pick one reading. The emotion in each of the readings of the poems in the full videopoem is where I'd like them to be - do I go with imperfect because it has the passion? Since I'm stalled, that's my inclination at the moment.


direct link: In the Hands of the Garden Gods (a poem I wrote at 27).

The final poem in of the three is one I posted here when I wrote it in 2006: Slipstream, oh the Tangled Garden, and I'm using the recording I made back then, too.

Anyway, the only way to get a major piece of creative work done, I find, is to take it in 'baby steps.' Rather than thinking a crazy week of no sleep or cooked meals, which no-one wants obviously and hasn't motivated me, I am thinking, 'clean up the poetry soundtrack,' 'fix the filters on the whole footage that you've mapped out.' 'Then start picking what footage to use in the background,' and where (some sections don't need it). Yadda, yadda.

When I finish it I am going to have to subtitle it too, groan, more work. The poems are so dense, the imagery quite rich, and sometimes I let Catherine Corelli's amazing singing drown my voice, that the viewer having access to the text is almost crucial.

I am such a perfectionist - probably you are too. Everything is the absolute best I can make it, given my limitations in training and equipment. That's how it is.
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Music, 'First Night (Lilith's Seduction)' from Catherine Corelli's album, 'Seraphic Tears': http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/79547