Speaking of the subject matter, my creative process for this project was characteristically excruciating. I usual when working alone, I was able to engage in obsessive overanalysis and anxiety filled self-critique. As usual in my process, I started with a stylistic approach to guide my conceptual ideas. I realize this is quite opposite a normal approach to media creation, but I think attention to the visual and aesthetic components of a work is an essential part of success. I wanted to use footage of caves I had gathered from my home in Southeast Alaska during the summer months of 2005, in order to accentuate the themes of fear, anxiety, social isolation, and emotional introversion that I planned to address in the voiceover component of the video.

As is also characteristic of my process, many of the subtleties and nuances were not planned, but added intuitively during the process of creation. This is true of the childlike voice accent in the primary voiceover, the addition of the whispered sub-voiceover, and the entire ending, which I will get to in a moment.

I had no consideration for those “readerly” people when I created this video; the complexities are so great and the ambiguities so abundant that the majority of meanings and interpretations gleaned will likely originate with the viewer. This does not bother me, in fact I would prefer it this way, in particular with this genre of autobiographical self-portrayal, with which I am very much less than comfortable with, especially with myself as subject.
[See post to watch Flash video]

That said, here is the complete text to the whispered vocal track. Note that this probably says more about me than the greatly pre-cognated and somewhat more understandable baby-voice track.The artists fought on in martial law, only their feet touching each other, their love reinforced with every stick, broken and crackling underfoot like malignant tumor growths, infuriating with metastasis. My hand raised to scratch an eyebrow, and all of the dolls were suddenly still, like deflated balloon animals. The snarling and clawing incessantly pounded through my head, … why wouldn’t they stop fighting? Poor wretches bathing in sunlight, they will soon die of banjo tumors. Plucking away at their heart-cockles, the lifespan pointer goes round and round. Fire and light, fire and fright. Seesaw of horatio goesleft and right like the sauce on your relationship with your mastication.

Fluff pouts of grandeur shower the doused spectacle of hairy toes in rotten grass. Gritty personalities squish with the rhythm of monstrosity and subjective horror pain. Morning lives in on molestation end forgiveness end. Tired like jangacalla on the eve of death’s burial. Flinch and pull out your guts. but then fear not, flowers bloomed there in the carnage, and great feasts were had by hummingbirds humming in the air like the tears of opera singers gone with the winding of music boxes in a candy store, sitting shyly in a corner, your erection growing inexorably without your control.

fire at your friends with the will of suppressed nations. Social and kinesthetic retardation backspace to remove the mark of unintended consequences on the forehead of your doom. UP is the cleft in subtlety, down is the hatred of burning of impermeable kinder boxes. burning man falling from the straw hat of an obfuscated peasant looking at the grey overcast sky and wondering just what the purpose is to life after death if death ends before life even begins. Even looking at the ceiling doesn’t bring comfort or solitude.

Chocolate seamonkeys whirl in a vortex of gregarious emotional substitution. The junk blown home surrounds quickly and smothers intellect with mud on the carpet drapes bellow. I can see the alcohol seeping away from your skin, like talcum from a chamber pot. Subtle choices of grandeur adorn even mundane objects of rapture and excitement … on Cunnilingus Island.

Lampshades of poison infect the dermis-parts of even joking weekly whales of men; grandparents who squint and buy only larger glasses, but not thicker because they don’t understand the true point behind apology and efficaciousness.

Did you see what just happened now? Mercy on the face of mitropia. Soft choirs of alarm sounding out across the peasant country is the will of the testament swinging on the beziere curve of Gonzo. your future slipping under your skin, ready to peel off the one worn since those days of incessant cares. these are not my edges, they are the scars which I cannot see, graduated to another plane of thought, the old tread underfoot (this line written by Yazmin Shaw).

The wasteland after the hurt of buggering by seldome seen bunnies: I am strong enough to see, I am strong enough to grip the aids virus nerve between two fingers and pushing my way through the crowd into a great hall of specter quality, where the picture of night sat with softness and revelry.

Where does the toffee go when it searches for innocence? Gangrene at 24 frames per second.

Those last words and the ending footage seem to me to be very confusing. I’m still not sure exactly what it means. Here is a quote from my notes made during the process of creation (regarding the ending):
This will be significant of your own struggle with the auto-representational nature of the project you’re doing, and hopefully make apparent the fact that you are a subject and are represented, not true/authentic; there is no authentic in media portrayal. is there an authentic self represented in social interaction any more than in movies/films? both are an act of representation. I slit the throat of the me in the film, and raise my arms to the fetid green of the projection screen, mirrored by it and afraid, but laughing.

A word on the technical aspects of Solus in Tenebrarum.
It was created in the midst of a convoluted workflow between Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 and After Effects 7.0. The primary editing of the background video footage and sound was done in Premiere, and then imported into After Effects, where all compositing, video effects, titling, and final composition of footage occurred. All rendered files were output to HuffYUV, an excellent fast lossless Win32 video codec, as the artifacts that DV introduced to the footage was unacceptable. The beginning title was rendered in 3D in Blender 3D, an excellent piece of free open source software. The title was then displacement mapped to give it the moving texture of the water in the layer underneath it, then duplicated and blurred, and then alpha track-matted, to the blurred layer, and blended with classic difference mode to the water layer. All footage was also converted to 24p from 30i in After Effects using the Reelvision Twixtor plugin. I then rendered the entire video with a 3:2 pulldown and authored to a 16:9 DVD for presentation, as the DVCAM decks in our screening room will not output 16:9 video footage with the correct aspect ratio, which is also unacceptable.

The process of creation of this video is somewhat interesting to note. All footage was ‘collected’ completely independant of this ‘production’. The story was actually created and sequentially evolved out of the seed ideas of the contents of the footage I had previously shot. For example, the idea of the “Omnipotent Artificial Consciousness” / Brain-in-a-Chamber-Pot was concieved and added into the script after the footage was shot, which was when I was about halfway completed with it.

Looking back on The Bees, there are some technical elements which I could certainly do better (notably, sound design and mixing!), however I am quite enamored with the amount of nuance and obfuscation in the story. I also love the stylistic approach of synchronizing audio and video, in both cuts and motion within the frame. This is evident throughout The Bees in the cutting, and to a more obvious degree in the fly breakdance scene. Note that this represents an imperfect initial exploration of this technique, and that I have honed and perfected my approach and skillls in later projects, such as the music video I did for edIT‘s track “Laundry.”

The editing was accomplished in Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, and various video effects were done in Adobe After Effects 6.5, with sound capturing and processing done in Sony Sound Forge 8.0.

Cinematography, sound and video editing, voice talent, video effects: Jed Smith
Music by Autechre, µZiq, End, Aphex Twin, Aix Em Klemm, and John Dowland.

Note: This video will require the most recent version of the Adobe Flash Player to work.