Friday, November 28, 2014

7.) Leaves

If you've been following this project you probably saw this coming.  It's true that I thought of a fall colors video way back in the beginning of the project.  But I wasn't actually motivated to do it until the leaves in the neighborhood couldn't be ignored.

This month's film was a lesson in waiting.   I really wasn't sure of what I was going to film this month, and I was getting a little concerned about it.  I could have forced myself to film something and make something out of it.   But I waited, and around the 10th of the month the fall colors were definitely calling to me.  But I didn't rush out to film until I had at least a vague idea of what the final product would be, which was a sort of impressionistic film of colorful leaves.

After filming I began playing around with editing.  There are only a couple of techniques I used, slow cross dissolves, and opacity, which allowed me to layer shots on top of one another.  I like the moments in the film where the shots really blend together and I lose a main focus point.

The music is a short little piece with jazz chords.  These are chords that I made of point of avoiding for awhile in my life.  But they are special sounds to me, and I've been feeling that it's time to put them to use again.  There are a a bunch of parallel minor seventh chords, and the piece came out sounding quite a bit like some compositions of the great pianist Bill Evans.  To me Bill is kind of the impressionist of the famous jazz pianists, so I think a good amount of Bill influence fits the film just fine.

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.