Work Text:
Password = life
Download: MP4 (27.07 MB), MP4 HD (294.38 MB), WMV (46.54 MB), WMV HD (54.15 MB), Subtitle file (SRT)
Streaming: Vimeo (Password = life)
This is, I think, my favourite vid of this year's Festivids. One of my own vids has never been my favourite before, although I have liked some of my others a lot in previous years - top ten quite often in the last few years, now I have enough skill to make the stuff I really want to see. But this? It captures something special, at least from my perspective.
I decided I had time for one more treat, and wanted to make a stretch goal - something difficult and not in my usual wheelhouse. I was thinking maybe a comic source, or a podcast, but then I read colls' description of this movie and was drawn to it immediately. I watched it, and really liked it, but I was particularly drawn to the career-driven man alone at the end of the world with one last self-imposed mission to make a connection with what was left of humanity. I've been thinking a lot about unfinished business lately, as I move through late middle age, and I thought I had something to say about it in this vid.
I knew immediately that a song wouldn't do the job. It had to be poetry. I listened to a lot of poetry. I finally found a handful of poems by Charles Bukowski that I thought might work, as they had the right kind of mix of the mundane and crude and elevated. I love stuff like that. Anyway, I had a go at reading this poem myself, but even with a lot of time spent in Audacity cleaning it up and adding effects, I couldn't get it to sound right. It needed to be read in a voice that registered as masculine, and mine just doesn't. When I found Tom O'Bedlam's reading I knew I had it.
Then I went searching for the music, and found this piece with a great combination of doleful and elated. I cut the poem over the music, and finally had my soundtrack.
Cutting the vid was about getting rid of clips until I had distilled my timeline into the simplest version of my idea (as I also mentioned in my notes on Prey).
The result is as close as I have ever made to a perfect vid. I have a lot of feelings about it.
I'm so glad colls liked it too. This is one of those times where I was really just making it for the two of us, and didn't care if anyone else liked it.