'Find darkness; bring it in. Find light; bring it in. IN.' -from Ink Ocean.
Some digital magic from the videopoem I am working on. On screen for maybe 12 seconds including dissolves in and out. This videopoem is like that. Will have to decrease it in size and fade it out somewhat, or destroy it even more than that in the final version of the video, but I thought I'd show you its present state. It's a 're-working' of my ink drawing, Ink Ocean (from which the poem arose).
The image (and it's got a little animation too) is such a complex construction that I have saved it as a separate project and am going to make a .mov file out of it and insert that back in to the main timeline. That way I can decrease its size and fade it out as a whole.
Here is the compound clip over the main timeline a little later - it changes in colour, as well as being a little bit animated:
In the process of making this post, I decided to uploaded the clip, all 12 seconds of it! Some of it actually changes colour throughout the sequence when it is part of the main timeline, as in the image above.
The original drawing, which does appear in different manifestations in the videopoem:
Getting there, slowly... perhaps 75% done, it's hard to say ...tissues still piling up beside me -good news is it's not bronchial because I can breathe deeply with no crackly sounds (I will visit the doc in another week or so if it doesn't let up).
The video editing timeline, as you can see, is becoming more complex, and I have made a few compound clips already. Actually, what I'm doing is a complete 'no no' in the more academic videopoetry circles because I'm illustrating. It's like I'm captioning with images - except it takes a lot longer than adding text and is if-y the whole while. Speaking of captions, I still have to subtitle, which [groan] is gonna take time too.
Good thing I'm still under with the post-flu blues. Wouldn't have the patience for this level of detail otherwise. [Bright side look.]
The mild fever and sinus headache, after 5 straight days, dissolved away yesterday. I am at the stage that is the last hurrah at the end of a bug run after which it should clear up but it might turn and dig in and descend into the bronchial passages. Since I am prone to bronchitis, I am still taking it easy. I do hope it is almost done its course and the appropriately created antibodies are now part of the inner army.
With boxes of tissues beside me, I've continued editing the video of the performance I did of Ink Ocean at Urban Gallery on Jan 29th. It's, well, you will have to wait.
Here's a teaser - a snapshot of a moment that is only a few actual seconds in the videopoem but an interesting image never-the-less.
Still around, still lots of photographs to crop, brighten a bit, and post. Had a bout of the flu (a-chu!) that seems to be hanging on. Hope everyone's doing well, and I'll be back, yes, yes.
Working on a video - first in well over a year or longer ...but then, being sick keeps you in one spot restin' - only who can do nothing all day long? So far, I have 70 video clips to add to my video - days of research and now we'll see how my sensibility and aesthetic craft this performance piece. Doing it, I realize that I really do have a 'style' that is quite unique and it seems that that sensibility and aesthetic continue to build on my 'style' and develop it. I really don't see videos like mine anywhere - probably because I use a tripod, do a performance, and work on the presentation as a visual artist creating a painting. I do it as a flat piece, without dips and dives, camera angles, scene changes, or any glitz at all. The style of my video oeuvre is a throw-back to the early days of cinema when there were no camera angles, no in-the-scene action shots. My performance poetry videos show the stage, the way cell phone vids of concerts do, but I work to make a different sort of magic in them. I like to let the poetry speak for itself, as it would if you were in the actual audience. Real film people of course don't like my video poems. They are considered boring, I suppose. But I don't think film students and practitioners are who my audience is, or the one I'm aiming for. Even without the support of the video/film/poetry community, I do quite well. I like to think it is because I am very clear on what I am doing and who I am doing it for and all I can say is I am actually quite happy with the success of my work (in relative terms - videopoetry is the least watched genre on YouTube - 200 views in a year is a successful videopoem, really, and my serious videopoems do much better than that).
Split Mask painting (for sale) and me in my handmade Split Mask at Urban Gallery where I had performed my poem, Split Mask, on January 29, 2014.
Original photo by Josef Hochleitner (see below), and then I spent hours photoshopping it to bring all the masks out of the shadows since it was a night time indoor shot.
Because I thought you might be curious, here is the wonderful photograph by Josef that I started with. He took it with his Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a flash at night and indoors. You can see in my final photograph the colour corrections I did, and how I highlighted the masks themselves (all closer to the original on the wall currently at Urban Gallery).
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Tons of photos, some video, and drawings to post from recent events I've organized at Urban Gallery to promote my Poempaintings show, but fatigued, been far too busy. A short note to say you will soon be inundated.
Lady of the Moon. I sewed this simple robe from a swath of beautiful lilac shantung silk for my private Goddess worship rituals in the 90s. I'd surround myself with a circle of pebbles from my cottage, and candles. I had an altar with spirals and sacred stones and Green and White Tara figurines, and the four elements - sand, incense, water in a shell, a burning candle in a 5-pointed star holder - behind which I hung my painting of the Sri Yantra. I followed rituals from books, both Western and Eastern, and I'd meditate and commune with the angelic forces... Bringing the robe out from the back of the cupboard flooded me with memories today. Perhaps we all pass through spiritual currents of one sort or another in our lives. This robe saw me through a particularly spiritually rich time. The memories make me smile inwardly.
I took the photo to show my fellow poets at our Performance Poetry evening tomorrow night as a possibility for a costume for some minimalist dance/creative movement to go with one of the readings. We are rehearsing tonight, and so will decide what works and what doesn't.
John and I already met for a jam to see how his music and my poetry might go together. Then I thought to offer some movement or dance to his reading in return. He thought that was okay. Yesterday morning, we each read through our poems and recorded them and sent each other the recordings along with the full text of our pieces so that he could think of what sounds to use with my poems and I could get a grasp of the images, image patterns, emotional undercurrents and the expressed emotions, as well as the heady stuff for moving creatively to/ dancing to his poems. Tonight we are meeting with Luciano to see if John's playing and me doing a minimalist, stuttering, shoulder-oriented dance (that centres around the larynx) in the lilac shantung robe with the split mask might also work to add a performative element to Luciano's poem. The actor who was going to perform with Luciano during his feature is out of town, so I am hoping to create something else so that our poems and their presentations adhere to the theme of the Poetry Salon: A Poetry Performance evening.
While unrelated to the Poetry Performance evening, as I was writing this post, I thought of a video I made, Shadow Cave, a dance with a voiceover based on one of the meditations I did in the 90s and which I wrote of in detail in my journal at the time. I thought you might be interested to see what sorts of things I got up to when I wore that robe:
And it is interesting that in the vision a woman is cave painting, and now the experts are saying that the hands on the caves of paleolithic and neolithic peoples are small, and likely womens'. (That said with a chuckle!)
