Motif Part One point Five: Pre-Post-Production.

I'm really getting out of order here. There are myriad reasons why.

I'm in class with only four clips I took to test out my view-finder guide, it was enough to set-up how I'm going to edit my piece. I guess you could call this an post-production heavy project, versus the art and literacy piece which one had to come into with a even a little deliberate planning. In essence, that was an exercise in shooting to shoot. This is becoming an exercise in shooting to edit.

No seriously, I got a lot of out today's exercise. Basically I pared down the images in repeating order to match the repeating phrase in the first part of the song. It is exactly 12 seconds long which, for editing purposes, makes it absolutely wonderful. Just add 12 seconds to the playhead, and not have to deal with trigesimal arithmetic to figure out how many frames to add. Plus, the phrase repeats itself about 7 times, and I only need to take 5 of those to get a minute. I couldn't have picked a better song to use, or so I thought. There's a lot of inner intricacies in those few 12 seconds that I've only partly picked apart, and make matching the images to the song a little difficult. In some instances, the sound lingers, which makes a better effect than if the image lingers. Ideally, the image and sound should have some distinguishing change simultaneously. It's all a matter of persistence. Unfortunately I deleted the original clips and am working now with just the pared down versions, and it's patently difficult to extend your clips using nothing.

Other than that, it's imperative I use a tripod to take footage. A stable image is basically paramount to the uniformity with which I'm expressing this motif. It's pretty much gotten out of hand, how far I'm taking this. No, I won't be using the tripod for every shot, just most of them. In the end, this motif should embody motifs, it should be a meta-motif, a motif about motifs. If I could use motif in a sentence any more times than that, I'm going to do nothing more than give myself a pat on the back. Motifs in just about anything literary or visual should be subtle in their pervasiveness, not redundant. Fortunately I don't have to put a lot of creative thought into the process, like something Oscar Wilde would approve of. I just need to shoot some damn circles. I find that the only thing harder than being subtle is not being subtle. And I'm trying my best at it.