Motif Part One: Pre-production.

I think I'm going to limit the number of posts per blog page to three. Having to load more than three posts with videos attached to them can add up in terms of bandwith after a while, especially if you're liable of being rate-limited. Having no internet is no fun after the first few minutes, let alone hours.

That said, I'm not sure where it started, but I was thinking I want to explore circular shapes for my motif. It was probably long before today that I thought it would be interesting to capture a number of varying images of basically the same thing, in essence, a motif. It would be great, I could film the moon, I could film the sun, I could even film someone blinking and have it change colors, á la 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately, the moon is not full, it's probably a bad idea to film the sun even during winter (and even if I'm fortunate to even see the sun in these cold months), and I really think I've done enough Kubrick homages in the past (although, I'll probably still do this one because I lack that much creativity... and it's too great an allusion to pass up). I still plan on doing this. Not only do I have a series of images, I have the perfect music to use, basically anything by the Appleseed Cast, who I saw this past Saturday. Their opening band, the insuferably obtuse sonic-indulgence-that-is Asobi Seksu, had a transparent drum kit, and upon seeing it I thought, 'that's it, I'm doing circular shapes.' There was something about realizing the quality of roundness, as if an opaque snare drum wouldn't give me that revelation.

Back to the Appleseed Cast: their instrumental stuff has this great circular quality to it with long, repeating riffs that have such a vast sound to them. I definately plan on laying down a track of theirs first and changing the image to match the bass or a rhythm beat. Oh, how my excitement right now is uncontainable! To make the circular shapes uniform, I cut out a piece of packaging tape, applied another piece of packaging tape to the first so their sticky sides were together, drew a large circle on it, and taped it to my view-screen. It works great, but it would probably help if I had a tripod or a steadier hand. Image stabilizers can do only so much...

That about does it for pre-production notes. As for principal photography, I really ought to preface the fact that I never go into shooting with more than a concept or a video prompt in my head. It's probably a good habit to start planning shots, but for this assignment particularly, I'm going to rely on taking video as need.