Radio silence

I've been distracted lately. During the last month or so my mind has not strayed far from the video project I'm putting together. The blessing and the curse of the project is that it's not your typical scheduled film shoot. Most of it requires little preparation -- which, don't get me wrong, is nice -- but having so much creative freedom makes everything and anything a possibility for capture. The act of narrowing it down is a big part of the challenge.

The other part of the challenge is making it look cool. There's a trick to avoiding cheesiness in video production, and I haven't fully learned it yet. Above all, the results of this project need to be visually appealing. I'm taking a photography-centric approach, shooting in broad strokes, and trying to follow my gut on the editing rather than getting too wrapped up in perfectionism. It's kind of like the opposite of the eighteen Bud Light videos I made; those didn't have to look like much, but I edited the heck out of them, stressing over every cut. This time I don't have the luxury of editing frame by frame because the final product is going to simply be too long (and my free time too short). If this all gets done (and I'm going try my hardest), I should have about 40 - 50 minutes of finished video. I still have a ways to go, so don't expect a lot of blogging for the next month.

I'm enjoying myself. In some ways I feel like I'm returning my roots, as this is most similar to the kind of meandering, moods-focused, music-inspired work I attempted to do way back in my early days with my dad's camera and two VCRs. (Hopefully my current work is an improvement, but we'll see.)

My deadline is near the end of September. After that I will have some stills to share with you. Eventually I'd like to rework some of the footage into a shorter, web-friendlier product, but that's pretty far off right now.

I'm not sure if all of the secrecy is needed, but I'm going to keep it up just in case. Plus, building anticipation is fun, even if I'm just setting everybody's expectations too high (and by everybody, I mean the three people who read this blog). Maybe it's too late to come up with a code name, but I'll give you one anyway. For now, I'm calling it The Sweater Project.