Originally my plan was to shoot a video made out of the careful ordering and assembling of completely random shots — trying to make meaning out of nothing through juxtaposition, in a sense. But I realized going out to shoot with literally no agenda is about the hardest thing possible. So then I thought I would incorporate magnetic poetry, and have each word give each scene some context … but ultimately decided that all my magnetic-word-orders were either 1) Really, really cheesy, or 2) Filled with innuendo. So was born my project as it ended up: dismantling a poem I admired into individual lines and giving each one of those lines a visual context that I ultimately attempted to craft into a vague kind of story.
In this way, I feel like my drafting process wasn't a lot different than alphabetic writing I've done in the past. I made outlines, made attempts toward final projects, and revised and refined my ideas until I landed on a path that took me somewhere satisfying. One main difference was that every time my idea changed, every drop of my previous work was wasted. With alphabetic writing, as ideas morph the text can morph with it; often times you lose a fair percentage, but the similar stuff can be reworked or rephrased and still used. With video, every shot is what it is. They contain so much information and so specific of information that you really can't 'rework' the raw material into new products. If you want to use a scene that has a character in a different shirt than the scene before it, you can't just change the words 'red' to 'purple'. You have to reshoot the entire damn scene. This fact is a cruel mistress when you're out shooting. If you get the focus wrong in one bit of a long take, or if the framing isn't quite right, or if you're too shaky, or or or or — CUT, and take it again from the beginning. There's no 'get it all down on paper and we'll rework it later' here.
With this in mind, in the future I think I'll try to have a clearer picture of where I'm going from the start. Thinking and visualizing so specifically what I wanted my end product to be was a good skill for me to have to flex, and one that I can see as coming in very handy if I were to approach alphabetic writing or photograph-creation the same way. This way of thinking in general is hard for me, because as a writer I'm absolutely more on the 'write now, make plans out of what you have later' sort of fellow. Even with photography, where you can have a vague idea of the shot you want or the series you have in mind and then go out and more or less come to a specific theme or the right shot as you go along, you can assemble the right shots out of the material you gather easier than in video (if not as easily as writing).
One of the more obvious things I had to learn in this piece was how to manually control the focus of by camera while shooting (my concept made this a real trial by fire, so I got pretty good my the end of things). Also, learning how to distinguish different types of soundwaves in Final Cut Pro was pretty tricky, and let me splice together/loop certain parts of a song that I liked to give me a continuous song that was more or less seamless. I also learned a new and very special kind of loathing for small pieces of paper, and all kinds of curses pertaining thereto in attempting to make them stay in that place, dammit.
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