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The music is Buralta by Fedaden, off of his new LP Broader (Beatport.com is the only place that has it in lossless, and it costs a ridiculous $25).

I shot my first timelapse a little more than a year ago. Above is a compilation of the best ones that I’ve created. I have learned a few things about timelapse:

1). Shutter angle in timelapses is very important. In stop motion animation, the strobing look of objects moving without motion blur is part of its visual aesthetic (except when counteracted by techniques such as Go Motion). In timelapse, since the subjects move by themselves, very filmic results can be achieved. The trick is to think about shutter angle, and to adjust your camera’s settings accordingly. Tyler Ginter wrote a more in-depth post about the technical and aesthetic considerations of Shutter Angle, but my description of it in application to timelapse follows.
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Since I graduated from college, I have been working steadily on learning theory and gaining practice in implementing a variety of visual effects techniques. I read books containing theory, namely Matchmoving: The Invisible Art of Camera Tracking by Tim Dobbert, and The Art and Science of Digital Compositing: 2nd Edition by Ron Brinkmann, I read manuals of software, I watched tutorials from the internet, I shot plates with my Canon HV20, and used shots from previous projects such as The Trouble with Unicorns. 8 Months later I now have a reel of content that is entirely new from when I graduated college, and have advanced my skill level significantly compared to what I was capable of then. However, I am still a fledgling and am excited to learn more, hopefully while being paid some small amount of money, so I can continue to pay rent and buy nutrients to survive.

Most of these little projects are primarily technical experiments, which serve to demonstrate a skill, and which provided me with some much needed experience. Therefore they are significantly lacking in any sort of conceptual and creative capacities, which are so essential to good work. However, competency applies much more than creativity in a junior level rotoscoping job. Don’t worry, I feel a boiling of creative output gearing up to burst forth sometime in the next 1-5 years.

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Here is a soundtrack for your ears of wind and rain.

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Yesterday eve, I sprang forth from the pages of the Art and Science of Digital Compositing, and spied beams of sun setting through the crack above the blankets shielding me from the outside, through the pain of glass. Gripped by sudden aescetic cravings of exterior exposure, I groped for objects of anamnesis both photographic and calligraphic and was on my way. With bicycle in tow, I rode to a mound of dirt, and this is what I saw.

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This is a piece of music written by family friend David Lamb in memorial of the death of my mother’s father. It is played by my grandmother (violin) and her brother Greg (piano), who is now also passed away.

Hearing it again reminds me that life is short. I have not been making the best use of my time. I moved to the Bay Area nearly 7 months ago. Since I’ve been living here, I have done a little timid exploring, very little extremely timid socializing, and a whole lot of keeping my cognitive tendrils embedded in the extended reality of my computer, with its vast, tempting, and marginalizing wealth of information and connectivity. While enabling great feats of externalized memory storage and access, and augmenting capabilities of information processing, storage, and organization, it seems at times that living life so absorbed in this abstracted processing tool results in an overwhelming reduction of critical thinking ability and other aspects of intelligent behavior.
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To the detriment of my poor elderly car, and the benefit of my endorphin levels, I took a trip back to Olympia. This visit was a respite from my previous months of working hard at living alone in California and having no friends and working all of the time on my reel and my procrastination. Then I came back, and continued doing the very same thing.

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Unfortunately I didn’t have a tripod on my return journey, so the previous consists of snapshots taken every 5 miles or so. The music is Traces by Cheju.

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Efterklang is an inspiring and amazing band who I first started listening to in 2005. They are from Denmark, and play a fascinating breed of music which blends folk, indie rock, electronic, and their own unique musical sauce into a compelling style of brilliantly dynamic, emotive, and beautiful compositions. I was fortunate enough to see them perform in San Francisco on March 10th.

I had the interesting experience of going to a club and seeing Tipper perform two nights before. For quite a while now, I have been excited by electronic music, and the potentialities for interesting new sonic and musical territories to be explored. All too often (as in many disciplines), I find the majority of electronic music to be uninteresting or even repulsive, because it strongly adheres to established patterns of style and form, is often rhythmically unsophisticated, does not experiment nor innovate, but instead self-congratulates and regurgitates itself endlessly.

As a relatively Anti-Sphexish human, I am predisposed to be repulsed by things that self-regurgitate endlessly. I tend to be interested and excited by things that push accepted boundaries and experiment, and that offer compelling, internally consistent, emotionally powerful, tantalizingly complex, and genuine (in the sense of sincere, profound, and non-cynical) “art”.
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