In-process- Anansi with Parchment Figures, Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones from Brenda Clews on Vimeo.

This bit of fun needs a poem! I'm thinking something with Anansi, the trickster African spider god...

I'd like to handwrite the poem onto the video, if I can figure out how, but won't be able to animate it.

I'm working on a longer videopoem with more of this footage, close-ups and so on, but thought to see what a small section might look like. I'm finding editing in FCE laborious and difficult since the tracks won't run in unlimited RT or lower resolution and only play when fully rendered and that's taking upwards of 2-6 hours for each tiny change! Not sure why.

If I can get to a point where I can see what effects are producing what then maybe I can work by imagining how it might be turning out (since I can't get even a sense in low res if it won't play)?

While the clips are mostly shot with my Canon Vixia HFS100, the curtain hanging by an outdoor patio is an iPhone clip. I did go back a few nights later with the Canon, but in a Winter cold snap I was in a long, hooded black coat and huge Sorrel boots and held my camera over the fence and freaked the owner of the house who turned off the light and sent their dog out to bark at me. I may try again in a few nights, or not- the grainy iPhone clip has its own charm.


Background music, a tiny section of 'Bodydrama at The Nave,' by ARTSomerville: jamendo.com/​en/​album/​53543

Painting, still unfinished, is mine: picasaweb.google.com/​brenda.clews/​ParchmentFiguresDoublesDoppelgangersClones




                                          

A friend treated me to a trip to Niagara Falls- so beautiful! I took some footage. I started on something last night, and this is the little video in process. I decided to try some parallel editing with the clip. I'm uploading the video before I add a poem and music - which I haven't written or looked for yet. Blogger now offers video again, so it's a good place to post works-in-progress (in hugely decreased size) before the final upload to YouTube (which doesn't allow edits in the same url spot). I find seeing a video I'm working on online helps me to figure out what needs to be done or where it should go - and I like sharing the process of making something, too.

I'd like something slightly noir in this videopoem, but so far no images have come. So I search through sites, music, films for a hook, something that will unravel a poem.

Not that I believe poems lie in wait to be born, but already this one is forming itself in the footage and I have to whittle it out of the thundering mist.

The Falls are magnificent, though the town of Niagara has become, with casinos, haunted houses and wax museums everywhere, the Las Vegas of Canada - in a quaintly Canadian way.



Videopoem-in-progress: Niagara Falls, First Project from Brenda Clews on Vimeo.

Because I initially tried to upload a file too large for Blogger's service, and it didn't take, I turned to Vimeo. Though I later figured out my error with Blogger's file size limits, Vimeo certainly offers a better resolution.




Still from the video. As a filter lady, yes, I did add a little something. Not telling what though! ::Smiling::

_
Later, nah, I'm not a gangsta writer, but noir, or neo-noir, can be a mood, a tone:

Tones of Noir

Numinosity
     washes the sky.

Poems rise
     out of thundering mist.

I think it is a crime.

She rushes by.

The water, 
     the power in falling.

Begin when it's in motion
and stop before it ends.

Mystical crystal spikes
     of sun.

He waits.

We walk quickly
covering ourselves against the watcher.

                                          

After watching many hours of NASA's amazing SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) footage of the sun at the Internet Archives, I downloaded some short videos and from them distilled the clips you see in this video. I am delighted to find this footage and to create a solar videopoem.

A vision of such power that what went before falls away in a rapturous death. A rapturous death of the ego. An unerasable enlightenment. That Rubicon. I was inspired to write this piece after seeing the movie, 'Sunshine,' which also uses footage from NASA's SOHO Observatory.