My first video project (and why I prefer photography)
I love films. I so wish I would watch more than a few movies per year. The film theory class I took in college was one of my favorites and most impactful even though it had nothing to do with my major or minor. Cinematography is fascinating and complex.
Yet, I've never been very drawn to videography. I love photography. It's so simple. Much simpler than videography at least. That doesn't mean it's easy though.
I much prefer trying to capture a particular moment, which of course relies on some amount of luck. I think photography is actually in some ways more active than film, too. Maybe even harder to understand because we experience life on a continuum and not as individual moments frozen in time. There is just something to me about leaving the scene to the viewer's imagination; video takes some of this away.
I feel much more comfortable making miniatures of reality, as Susan Sontag describes photographs.
Recently I decided to get out of my comfort zone a bit and assemble some clips I took in Kazakhstan. I didn't think to try to make this until I was already there for a bit, so it's definitely missing some highlights. Also, even though the stabilization on my camera is decent and I further stabilized some of the clips, it is obvious that I didn't have a tripod.
I hate editing photos, but I have to say editing this video was much more annoying. At least I learned how to use kdenlive, a pretty cool open-source video editor.
But that's how it is. Nothing fancy, just some moments strung together. I think it could be worse. Here it is. Of course, it takes time to load.
Credit goes to Celer for the background music.
Maybe I'll try to make another (and better) video in the future. I need to educate myself a lot more though.