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Sunday, January 10, 2010

A Video Sketchbook

Every so often I go wandering around blogspot, looking at bloggers who list on their profiles some of the same favorites or interests I do.
Yesterday I found Dania at A Movie a Day (we both list The Lives of Others).
She's a filmmaker who makes and posts a video sketch every day. They are very short--less than a minute. Some feel very Zen, some ironic, some are autobiographical (I love the one of her bookshelves).

Some put me in mind of Alfred Stieglitz's abstract photographic studies, like the cloud series "Equivalent".
Right: "Equivalent" 1930
"The theory of equivalence... was infused by Kandinsky's ideas, especially the belief that colors, shapes, and lines reflect the inner, often emotive "vibrations of the soul."

Dania describes her blog:
"I'm in a funk and need to get out. I have no problem watching a movie a day, but find it more and more difficult to get my video projects done. Work or scheduling issues seem to keep getting in the way.
An artist I know set out on a project to make a drawing a day as a way to deal with these problems. I've decided to use a Flip camera and iMovie to make one short video sketch a day. Some narrative, some not, hopefully some interesting. We'll see what happens when there are no excuses."

You know, when I got my videocamera in August 2008, I immediately started working on an ambitious film (the 8 min. Orestes and the Fly). I've barely played around, visually, with my camera at all. (I think partly because I've always been so attuned to words.)
Now I want to stop and experiment, independent of the need to communicate a narrative story.

I can't do anything (shouldn't even be blogging this) until I finish the Netherlands job, but when I do, I want to start a video sketchbook too. Maybe not a daily one, but I want to mess around and find my own visual vocabulary.
For now I'll just keep taking photos of the books by my bed, which form weather patterns of their own.

3 comments:

  1. Fresca,

    Thank you so much for viewing my blog and letting others know about it. I'm enjoying delving into yours.

    I've always believed you could learn all you needed to know about a person by looking at the books by their bed and on their bookshelves.

    Dania

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  2. Hmm, I wonder if Wittgenstein was thinking of St. Augustine when he said "That of which one cannot speak one must remain silent about".

    Sounds better in German.

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  3. Welcome, Dania.
    I agree--and I'm intrigued merely to look at photos of bookshelves.

    ARTS:
    But I don't think Augustine ever remained silent, he just talked about not being able to speak about things! (He's always in a twist, I love that about him.)
    And this is one of those wonderfully twisty concepts philosophers like to try to get into words.

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