Ceven’s Blog

Coming with the end of summer I begin to feel the first bits of the next creative moult. While I never seem to stop working, it is more difficult to concentrate during the spring and summer months. All the big projects (i.e. Anderecast, die Abmachung film script, a book manuscript, nevec red) have been born out of the autumn/winter time.

This has however been an uncommonly productive summer. After writiing the film script while working on nevec red and Geräuschkulisse music it was time to do something different. There have been some technological setbacks which have turned out to be good. My wonderful old hi8 video camera began to sputter and needed to retire from heavy filmmaking. It caused me to experiment with other forms of image capture. This led to rethinking how to approach the subjects of my videos, which spawned some interesting results. I began with the camera from my mobile telephone, a Sony Errickson W890i. Out of all the phones that I know of Sony Errickson tends to have the best cameras. I assume it’s because their lenses are glass (but don’t quote me on that). The CyberShot is far superior to the Walkman phone that I have in terms of digital photography. Ironically the video camera in the Walkman is better than the CyberShot. Both cameras shoot at what seems to be about 15fps, which is definitely low quality. The size is also quite small (320×240px), but sometimes the pixel artefacts are interesting and I’ve been playing with patching several images together. At a time when I find that most filmmakers can only see themselves using high end DV or HD, I find the lo-fi rather refreshing. There is nothing truly extraordinary about my telephone’s camera and that in itself makes it a fascinating tool. Any changes to the controls distorts the quality even further so it’s best to work with it as it is and then play with the images in editing.

I’ve also had the great pleasure over the last few weeks to shoot with another kind of camera. The results need to be seen and not read, but suffice to say I am more than pleased with the images. It’s been a nice to go into the theory of photography and digital imaging and learn things I’d not taken the time to before. I’m curious to see where it goes from here!

Over the next month I will try to finish the projects that are sitting in front of me and then pick up where I left off last winter. The time away from the film script has me buzzing with new ideas in how to fix the problem areas. The book manuscript has also recently come back to mind. I’m looking forward to many long nights working on new music material for nevec red. Once Halloween is here I’ll be standing at the front gates of the next metamorphosis!