This is a long term documentary video project. Just getting started…
See more here:
https://www.facebook.com/RecreatingTheHistoricColumbiaRiverHighway
Tracing the original route and history of Oregon's Historic Columbia River Highway from Troutdale to The Dalles.
Overall, family needs have taken much more of my time than I'd hoped the last few weeks, so I was not able to do much with NaNoEdMo last month and Camp NaNoWriMo is looking like a pass this month, too. I'll get to my novel, but now is apparently not the time for me to be finishing the darn thing.
I've got about a week to finish my next Genero.tv video and then I may have a little video project on deck after that one. We've got to re-launch the house hunt. We've got a lot of work ahead with the boys over the next month or so as we finalize some plans for their education next year. And life, unexpected, will continue to show up in both exciting and wonderful or disappointing and ugly ways, depending on the day...
So, that's what's going on right now...
Taking this down for now. Maybe things will change later this month, but for now? Maybe one of the later sessions this year.
I am not writing reviews on Goodreads, but just making some notes on the books I am reading from time to time…
These are my notes my recent re-read of the first Foundation book…
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Reading an omnibus with the original Foundation trilogy, but I wanted to make notes on each book individually and I love these covers from the 1980s, they illustrate the progression through time really well, showing Trantor in its various stages of decay...
Forgot how good these stories were. Much more solid than Asimov's robot stories. These were written a little later, so that makes sense. You can really see how he is developing as a writer.
Of course, these books are more about the ideas than the writing. The empire on the brink of collapse, while at its strongest, seems a bit more relevant today that it did when I first read these in the 1980s. The use of religion in the early days of the Foundation is brilliant, especially the untangling of power between the priesthood and secular leadership that must occur later on.
One thing that strikes me about the writing is the fact that very little "action" actually takes place "on screen," so to speak... These stories are a series of quiet (mostly) conversations about the great events taking place in the universe around them. But it is done so well that it is almost easy to overlook that.
One critique, though... One of the brilliant things about these stories is showing how history progresses, in most cases, slowly. Kingdoms do not rise and fall in flashes of brilliance and fury, they evolve slowly and die slowly. There is a real sense of this. The short story structure really helps this, too.
However, the dates feel a little accelerated to me. Especially with the development of the priesthood. That, to me, would seem like it would take, at a minimum, at least one more generation to really gain the grip it needs for the climatic events with the Four Kingdoms to occur.
I almost suspect that, if Asimov wrote these as an older man, he would have spaced those events out a bit more. However, to a younger man, 20 or 30 years feels like an eternity...
View all my reviews
Forgot to set my clock for the time change and now my computer is running slow. Annoying morning. Rushing to get out the door for church (or not) and, later, an old friend’s memorial service.
But I wanted to take a few minutes (precious minutes) to pause and take stock for a minute…
Finished my Dead Can Dance video last week. A LOT of hard work went into that, all during a very hectic time in my life. I am proud of it, but I know that it is not what it should be.
At first I was very relieved that it was done and I was looking forward to being able to really take some down time and to re-focus my attention on some family issues (the little one is having a pretty rough time right now and, of course, part two of the great move…) and on still photography and writing…
This was supposed to be the first time since mid-October when I didn’t have a big project deadline hanging over my head and big ticket life stuff going along at the same time.
Of course, there is still the whole chore of getting a house, but we are taking a time out from that endeavor to focus on getting stabilized as a family after all of the big ticket items going down since November.
However, with my video, at the last moment I realized that it might not be eligible to win because of the sculptures I used in it. It was all public art (or visible from the street, at the very least) and I thought that it would be all right to use those images without releases. However, a closer look at the fine print, and it might not be.
So, if my video is selected as a finalist or as the winner, there may be a crazy 72 hours running around trying to get clearances for the sculptures in the video. However, unfortunately, I don’t think it is going to be an issue.
I wanted to spend a lot of time working on the editing for that piece, and it ended up being a last minute rush job because real life intruded heavily the week before the deadline. I sort of feel like I submitted a first draft, not a final draft.
Because of these two issues, I am left feeling really unfulfilled after all of the work I put in.
Genero has another video project up, though, that I would really like to work on. I can use a lot of footage I shot for the Dead Can Dance video, shoot a little bit of new stuff, and bang this one out pretty quick with proper time to edit the thing.
In some ways, it will feel like a re-do of the Dead Can Dance video. Not really, because it will be exploring slightly different themes, so maybe it is more like a follow up?
Considering all the unused footage I have left from Dead Can Dance, some lessons learned while working on the DCD piece, and the fact that it is a shorter song, this should be a project I can knock down without disrupting our lives too much between now and the April deadline.
And it doesn’t feel like a big crazy deadline project because of this, though there will still be a little bit of dropping everything and running during the three or four days of sunshine we have between now and the deadline. Need more time lapse footage!
Of course, it does look like I am allowed to re-tweak the Dead Can Dance video and re-upload it. The deadline is met, but I can still modify the thing, apparently. However, I need a couple more days distance before deciding whether or not to spend a crazy 24 hours or so re-cutting the damn thing.
Pretty much I feel like I’ve done the work I can put in on this one and that it is time to move on, though if a couple small changes might help it, then maybe… However, I am not going so far as to take the worrisome sculptures out, because that would involve re-thinking the whole video. I could do this, but it would not be the video I wanted to make at all.
Then there is the writing. After the two big video projects (One Day On Earth and the Dead Can Dance video), I need to get back on finishing the first draft of my novel!
A plan has evolved. First I will re-emerse myself in the novel through this month’s National Novel Editing Month, and then I will finish the first draft during April’s Camp NaNoWriMo.
This is something of a change in direction for me. I haven’t looked at the thing since the first week of December or so, so I knew I’d have to go back and at least read the draft I have so far, but then I discovered that a group is running NaNoEdMo this month (National Novel Editing Month). My first reaction was that I did not want to get bogged down with editing the first 2/3 of the book before I’d written the ending…
Yet, since there will have to be some reading this month anyway, and that will be accompanied by some red inking and notes… So yes, I do have a fair amount of editing to do this month, one way or the other, before I feel comfortable resuming the actual writing.
A late start, yes, but NaNoEdMo is on. I am still setting this up, but I know this so far. There will not be any attempt to reach some crazy goal. I am not going for a “win” here. I will try to get to the end of the draft with a bunch of red inking and some minor notes, and that is about it.
So why participate in the first place? Well, NaNoWriMo was a wonderful experience where I could interact with other people who were having the same experience I was with their artistic efforts. I haven’t had that sense of community with my last two project and, well, I miss it.
Sure, I post a lot of crazy manic stuff about my projects on Facebook, but no one there really can relate (or cares that much, let’s be honest!). But with NaNoWriMo, people did relate because, in those forums, they were all going through the exact same thing…
This is all in prep for the April Camp NaNoWriMo, and I’ll be using that venue to finish the damn book. This is cool because, unlike November’s NaNoWriMo, this event has variable goals, and I can set them to meet the projected length of the novel.
Right now I am aiming for 110,000 words. That will involve some significant cuts during NaNoEdMo and a rather economical run to the end of the novel. I am worried that it will be hard to fit it all in in 30K words, but there may be up to 20K that I can trim (10K is more likely) this month.
So, I am looking at up to about 50,000 words to churn out in April, but I think it will go quickly, once I am settled back into the world of the book and, from where I left off to the end, everything is practically written in my head already. It is just a matter of banging through to the end.
NaNoEdMo: http://www.test.nanoedmo.net
Camp NaNoWriMo: http://campnanowrimo.org
Dead Can Dance Video: http://genero.tv/watch-video/35247
Olafur Arnalds Video: http://genero.tv/olafurarnalds/
Posting my Dead Can Dance video, I realized that I’d never posted the final, complete One Day On Earth video from this year…
On Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/57311062
One Day On Earth Archive: http://archive.onedayonearth.org/videos/index/57260667
An Interview with Sue-C « Cycling 74:
Sue-C creates beautiful live videos using a collection of various small objects and some deceptively simple Jitter patching. Watch Sue describe her unique performance approach and how it all comes together in this video interview.
Fatal Loop from SUE-C on Vimeo.
Live at the Lab from SUE-C on Vimeo.
This is interesting. Not sure how interesting the second video by her is, I moved on about half way through, but there is a lot of interesting things that can be done with a set up like this…
