Three tiny experiments, steps in getting comfortable with Adobe’s Premiere Pro. All are Talking Dogs (it’s not what they say, but that they talk at all):
Talcott Parsons
A professor at Harvard, back in the day, seemingly resident in a rock at Drift Inn Beach (experimenting with Adobe Draw and the iPad)
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Ondine and Imam Two beings discovered in ice and rock, respectively (another brace, Adobe Draw again)
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A first try at mirroring (there will be many more…)
A fourth YouTube video is up: Ken Burns has Hash at Home Kitchen Cafe, again and again
With each of the videos I’ve done I have learned some valuable lessons, and with each I tried out something new to me. After sending links to a few friends, I then made further edits and changes which I haven’t made public.
I have at least half a dozen other clutches of photos that video presentation would enhance, at least in terms of distributability, and I’ve realized that I need some more sophisticated tools, and more careful consideration of where I really want to take this phase of photographic exploration. And so I’ll be doing a 2-day Premiere Pro workshop at Maine Media during the coming weekend.
It’s very useful to consider Ken Burns himself on the “Ken Burns Effect”:
…a very honorable attempt on my part to will old photographs alive…
…willingness to not hold a still photograph at a distance. To just merely acknowledge its plasticity, to not just see its two-dimensionality but to go into its world and to trust that that world had a past and a present. And to activate it. And to be the feature film-maker that I wanted to be with a master shot, a wide shot, a medium shot, a close shot, a pan, a tilt, a reveal, inserts of shots. And to listen to that photograph. To ask the question, “what sounds is this photograph making if it were alive?” That’s what I do…
from Ken Burns: the Kindle Singles Interview (conducted by Tom Roston)
It will be interesting to see how this particular toboggan ride goes.
During the last week I’ve been experimenting with iMovie, initially to build a draft of a video presentation of my Morphic Resonance images for the July show at Granite Gallery, then to construct a Home Kitchen Cafe video to update the Blurb book Order Up! (I’ve eaten a lot of Home Kitchen meals since May 2016), and today to try a video presentation of Lynn English High School graduates, 1929. I have uploaded the three drafts to YouTube, but certainly mean to work on them further, and probably completely revise as I figure out what works and become more adept with iMovie. Here are the three Version 1.0 videos:
At Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts we saw a wonderful Charles Sheeler show, which included the [silent] film Sheeler and Paul Strand made in 1921. The whole 10-minute film is wonderful, but this scene is sheer genius for the time. Or any time, come to that.
What a marvelous condensation, the perfect intro to a Human Geography course, or to a lifetime of study for that matter. For my money, it’s at 3:30 that the big leap occurs, as he disaggregates China into provinces, but the whole package is simply brilliant pedagogy:
I’m continuing my exploration of video as a medium of escape for my Nova Scotia Faces collections, this time with a short narrative linking together photos from a photo album rescued from a junk store in the 1970s. I’m not completely satisfied with this presentation, but it’s useful to try out different approaches. I don’t know what I think until I see what I say…