Just film a moment and send it off. Stop dicking about and letting the side down.

It’s no wonder I’m behind with my posting. I’m spending too long doing my hair.
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Lullaby 2.0

A timeless bedtime/bathtime scene.

This was actually preceded by another scene in which she was crying uncontrollably, and I tried singing Baa Baa Black Sheep, Row Row Row Your Boat, Five Little Ducks and Horsey Horsey to calm her down, to no avail. Then I had a moment of divine inspiration and started singing something which made her instantly flop in my lap, head back, still and calm… the Main Theme from Star Wars. Anybody looking through the window at us would’ve been forgiven for thinking that I was singing Ave Maria.

Not that she’s seen Star Wars. The only time she’s heard any of the music was in Car Going Fast film. Which was a bit of a favourite last week. So me singing the theme reminded her (a totally different part of the theme, though, so she’s pretty smart to pick it up). Next thing I knew, she was sitting on the loo demanding Car Going Fast. Watch on Loo, Daddy.

What am I doing to my family?

(other than turning them into light entertainment for you?)

Files:
Quicktime / Flash

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Kate’s first videoblog post

I handed the camera to Kate today. We were in Burnham Beeches, just outside London (map/satphoto). The colours are incredible this year. Another thing I’ll miss in evergreen Vancouver Island.

I was trying to persuade her to sing her song The Falling of the Leaves (a Yeats poem she set to music – you can hear it on her Myspace page) so that I could use it as a soundtrack for the other moments I shot all around the woods. But this is better.

I think I’m going to give her the camera more often.

Alternative file types:
Quicktime / Flash (click to play if player above doesn’t work)

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Trip on the ferry to Dartmouth

Just some moments from a trip down the river yesterday.

It’s a funny thing – I probably wouldn’t post this if it weren’t for NaVloPoMo. Because it’s aspiring to be something it’s not.

I wanted to do NaVloPoMo because I thought it’d make me feel more comfortable posting just *anything* without judging it too much. I wonder whether it’s having the opposite effect. Seeing all the amazing things other people are posting has made me dissatisfied with the kind of stuff I’m doing with this phone.

It’s made me realise that I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with my mobile phone’s aesthetic limitations. It shoots good *resolution* for a phone but I don’t really like the colours, the contrast, the *character* of the video it makes.

So while it’s great for capturing personal human moments and posting them in the moment, without frills, it’s not so good for taking moving snapshots of *things* that I see and want to photograph. The images just look flat, and dull.

I know that making things on my phone has got me making things and posting more often, which is great. And the aesthetic limitation has stopped me getting too hung up about what I make, which is also great.

But in NaVloPoMo I wanted to post a whole load of different types of films up, and some of them just won’t work with this phone. I want to start playing with a proper camera again.

And the truth is, I haven’t got time to. It’s already causing tension at home, the amount of time I’m spending at my computer for NaVloPoMo – and all I’ve posted are simple single-shot nothingy little snapshots. The time spent cutting the San Francisco film last week and this film today are just *too much*.

So I guess I’m stuck with my phone and its boring image quality. And that’s what I’ve got to work with this month. That’s my challenge. Fight the aspirational demons that tell me that you’re all making more interesting videos than me. Fuck it. Just post stuff. And talk. Create and connect. Kill the artist. 🙂

And yeah, yeah, I know… a bad workman blames his tools…

File types: Quicktime I Flash

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Moving Snapshot: Family

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My brother-in-law Jan, my sister Amanda, my nephew Vijay and their dog Finnigan. And Amy. On Long Beach in Tofino, on the wild Pacific coast of Vancouver Island. This is just what I need to watch at the moment – takes me right back there. Amazing place, amazing holiday.

They didn’t know I was filming. If you quietly set up a static frame and press record, invariably it fills with beautiful movement, purely by chance. Moving snapshots.¬¨‚?тĆ I shot a lot of pictures like this, while I was away, instead of taking stills.¬¨‚?тĆ Inspired by Lumiere rules videos, but different – I like to keep the sound, to give whole new levels of atmosphere, and I like to be able to press start/stop whenever I want to rather than have to cut it off at 1 minute.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)

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Lumiere: From the Scaffold

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We’re having our loft turned into a bedroom. Our house is enmeshed with scaffolding. I have mild intermittend Vertigo. Sometimes I totally freak out at heights. But it was too beautiful an evening to resist climbing the extremely wobbly ladder.

This video has no sound. It’s a Lumiere Rules video.

The rules are as follows. They mimic the conditions under which the Lumiere brothers made their movies in the late 1800s:

  • 60 seconds max.
  • Fixed camera
  • No audio
  • No zoom
  • No edit
  • No effects

To browse more Lumieres by other people, visit http://videoblogging.info/lumiere/

Formats available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4)

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Lumiere: Amy makes a video

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The only thing she loves more than watching herself in my videos (“again! AGAIN!”) is holding my phone and looking at herself on the screen, thru the little low-res camera next to the screen.

The camera was glitching, which produces quite a nice effect. There’s no sound because this is a Lumiere.

It doesn’t seem to matter how many times you say that, people still say “Oh! I can’t hear anything.”

Just goes to show how pointless it is to write text on a videoblog. Why am I even writing this? You’re not reading it. I killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.

I’m loving the Lumieres that are being made all over the world. Hundreds of them. To browse them, visit http://videoblogging.info/lumiere/

The rules are as follows. They mimic the conditions under which the Lumiere brothers made their movies in the late 1800s:

  • 60 seconds max.
  • Fixed camera
  • No audio
  • No zoom
  • No edit
  • No effects

Formats available: Third Generation Platform (.3gp)

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