KIM & SYMPATHIA
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I am making weekly few-minute long videos of my meditative music with meditative watercolour paintings that slowly roll together. My hope is that for the viewer/listener, this will be a kind of gentle meditation. For me, it will be a chance to learn the whole process of recording and editing, and by the end of the year, I imagine that I'll be pretty good at it.
So kindly follow me as I work on these, if you are interested in seeing the progress of someone plodding away at their work, and/or if you would like to have relaxing music and images to meditate to, or put on while you're working.
For a long time I had been trying to think of a way that I could make my music regularely, to have a project that would push me to improve but in a way that would also prevent me from being perfectionistic. Perfectionism is absolutely the death of art because we are always improving, so even if we define our perfect as doing our best, our best is always what is just out of reach. The trouble with that is that so much wonderful art that has been created but never sees the light of day because the artist can never decide that it’s good enough.
I have always loved artistic animation. There is not much of this, but I would count ‘The Logdriver’, ‘Ma Merle’, and especially ‘Walking’ as beautiful examples that you can look up. All of these are productions of the National Film Board of Canada which means that I saw them as a child on TVOntario. I can’t imagine the hours of work involved in these works. Animation is an artform in itself and an incredibly time-consuming one, but for at least a year, I was rolling around in my mind how I might be able to make some kind of animation to provide simple visuals for videos, where I could practice recording music and have something done, and let it out into the world even before I felt like it was any good.
I started imaging slowly moving, slowly changing shapes and colours, that would be meditative to go along with my music. I decided to start out with an abstract horizon landscape. I decided to start with square, because calculations of what this could cost were high and if I started with smaller pieces of paper, I would have more room to experiment without too much worry. (Basically, if I were to do my whole year’s worth of videos at this length and size, if would cost $1000 for the paper alone.
For this first video, I decided to just go for it, and paint in different ways that I could imagine might create interesting effects. I did one test to make sure that the concept was viable, and then I sat down and painted 50 little paintings, one after the other. When I had painted them all, I began the process of figuring out how to take photos of them all and put them into a video editor, and create the long blending transitions in a way that I liked.
For the music, I did something similar. I sat down and played and recorded what I played the best I could, and then I put it in the editing software and edited it as best as I could. My music has the added challenge of recording the ringing sympathetic strings. I want them to be audible in a YouTube video, on cell phones and laptops, and also the strings ring right when I want to breathe, which creates a lot of noise in the recording. Over time, I expect to get better and better at coping with this. There is so much I can learn from others, and to a certain extent, I just need to experiment.