Happy Holiday! It was a day off on Monday following July 4th, although it didn’t affect life here very much. We got into the spirit of things as best we could, by staying up beyond 12 for the first time and going down to the lake to light a fire and listen to the bawdy bullfrogs. I’ve revised my earlier assessment and now would describe them as sounding more like a chorus of twanging rubber bands. Except for one who sounds like a donkey.
Other than that I have been hard at work filming and editing, as usual it’s the latter that takes ages, runs into problems and is more boring. But there is pleasure in having a daily overview of all the footage I’m shooting, and the fact I’m uploading it all to Youtube means I’m having to organise and correctly label every clip, then cross it off the list of instructions so I don’t repeat it. Some of the more generic taglines are being repeated, for example those that involve yoga, meditation, and reading because I tend to do those every couple of days. Others are much more specific and take a certain amount of location scouting and lo-fi prop planning: like the ‘woman wrapped in fabric sits in the sand’. It was absolutely roasting hot when I did that one, and being cocooned in heavy sheet fabric was quite an endurance test. Obviously with those actions there is a purposeful misinterpretation of the description, which was probably aiming for a kind of deluxe, sheer fabric and a sandy beach setting, rather than mud green bed sheet and gravelly sand. However I must be doing something right as someone contacted my channel to say the videos were ‘awesome’ (clearly American) and did I want advice on how to get featured on Youtube? Not sure I do, but it made me think I could have success with selling the footage.
The daily routine of organizing footage, charging batteries, making lists, crossing things off lists and then filming and repeating the whole thing again if there’s time means I haven’t been considering the ‘final outcome’ film very much. At the moment I’m looking to get the database as full as possible, with the intention of then writing a script from the taglines, so that the text becomes a kind of storyboard of which the video footage is the illustration. But I was contemplating working the other way round, so that I start to hone in on the final text and then make sure I have the clips to go with it- that way there is a definite set of instructions that must be carried out in order for the film to happen. Also I like this idea of hidden labour, since the clips I’m uploading are mostly fragments from the whole piece of footage, particularly so for the mediation and reading ones. Of course the viewer takes that on trust- I may have just sat down for 30 seconds and called it a wrap. But that’s part of the fun.
Finally one thing which is winding me up no end is the lack of visible sunset. I can’t find one anywhere and if I were to cycle it would mean returning along unlit roads which everyone has assured me would be dangerous. I am going to peruse some forums to see if there is any mention of good sunset points in East Haddam- otherwise it will have to wait til I get to New York.
Concealment
