Rome, day 5. A one minute video of frozen city life, only plants and weeds are alive. The soundtracks is built from recorded sounds of each scene, slowly freezing up and fading as soundtrack. A soft chord from the Botanic Garden Cactus Fans slowly drone into focus below.
Rome is beautiful, maybe too picturesquely beautiful. I wanted to spook it up a little. I like the tiny little plants and weeds that quietly struggles for survival in a city slightly obsessed with formulaic beauty. Not sure if I want to use this concept in the end, but yeah maybe, something like this.
I tend to fall for the forgotten ugly things, not the obvious pretty bling. This was one way to explore it.
Did most of this simply with handheld GoPros, and had to use motion stabilizers in post. Which got me thinking.
Motion stabilizing is a process that will be gone in the future. There should a word for things like this… things that will become anachronisms; prenochronisms? In a few years most cameras will come with highly sensitive gyroscopes and motion sensors, some already are halfway there, automatically correcting any jerky movements when recording. Or most likely, they will just record the camera movement separately in sync with camera lens, meaning you can adjust image fluidity in post. Which means, our jerky hand-held footage will come to define our age, the hapless first video camera era. Current developers of motion stabilizing software will become rich making the exact opposite of what they do today, retro filters creating 2008-movements on hyper-stabilized footage.
Maybe this is universal; if there is a software today correcting some problem, in a few years time, there will be opposite software to re-introduce it for nostalgic and time-stamping reasons.
Spent most day today editing, processing and producing this, but also spent the early morning sketching a track, and reading my books whenever there’s a moment. I’m starting to build a story, or rather a background setup for a story, with some characters, and wrote some themes for one of them, and keep making up backgrounds for them as I read the books.
Wrote down a bunch of notes at the bar last night, and had lunch at a quiet local cafe by a piazza, kept taking notes.
Went for a long walk in the delicious afternoon heat to a local park.
Lots of kids going crazy with shaving foam in the fountains. Maybe it was the last day before summer. The sun is hot, and walking in the quiet under the pine trees was great, I love this spruce-ish fragrance of warm pines, floating on soft grass. Maybe there are multiple beauties of Rome and some of them doesn’t have to be made spooky.
