Monday, June 14, 2004

Love & Numbers: A tape is born!


Well, it's been three very gruelling years since my last video Anhedonia, which won an award and played at festivals here and there. Now I finally have a new tape out, after much effort and difficulty I might add. First of all I was working in Imovie. Why? Because my computer is stupid and needs upgrades before I can use the fancypants software I wish I'd been able to use. But I figured, oh, I'll just do my rough edit in imovie and then import it as a quicktime into Final Cut Pro. Ha ha ha. First of all, I had techie issues exporting it as a quicktime. Read on a dv forum on the net to locate the imovie.plist file and throw it away. For other people with this same problem DO NOT THROW AWAY YOUR PLIST. It means imovie will forget your project ever existed.

So I died. And then I was ressurected, and worked for half an hour pulling my tattered plist out of the trash and finding the freakin' folder that it came from and replacing it. Sigh! This motivated me to just finish the video in imovie and export it to the digital camera I have on loan from the lovely people at Indigenous Media Arts Group so that I can say "Yes, I have a new tape!!"

Sometimes making art is trying. I forget who said it, but someone said intellectual labour takes you out of society. It is true. There are a lot of lonely moments making videos, when you're writing, or when you're editing, or if you're like me, when you're shooting as well. It can also be a great way to bring people together though. But I'm not about that right now. I'm about being alone and making art.

I think I like it. It's a fairly dark piece, but I think it captures the essence of global and psychotic paranoia, and the desire to find human contact and love in these troubled times. It's pretty intense. I think I want to make a fun video next, you gotta balance yerself out after all. But this little video (eight minutes running time) has been percolating at the back of my mind and was aching to get out. So it's out, I gotta make submasters and that, but it should be at Video Out distribution here in Vancouver by the end of the week, and at Videopool, V-Tape, and possibly GIV within a couple months. It's called Love & Numbers and it will be screening this fall at ImagineNative film festival in Toronto. I hope you enjoy it!

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