A year and a half into my learning sabbatical and I see the progress I've made not only in the craft of taking and processing photographs. I also see the weaknesses in my work more clearly.
While driving to the Final Cut Pro Users Group meeting a week ago, I had a comforting insight. The time and money I am using to learn the new craft in graphic and video production is what a young person would be spending going to college. The main difference: I don't have as much time as that young person. What I do have is perhaps a clearer vision of where I want to go, and maybe a dose or two of maturity or common sense.
I have my doubts about the clear vision. I had another insight, this time at the meeting itself while the group leader described his experience making an HD video with the Canon D5 Mark II. I've ruled out narrative video features and thought documentaries were what I wanted to shoot for. Documentaries are easier to do with no experience and no money to hire writers and actors and I enjoy watching documentaries, especially travel and history documentaries. But most documentaries are ho-hum. I want my work not just to document experience but to move the viewer either emotionally or artistically.
I've had no prior experience in artistic movement, only some experience in creating emotional movement but this in a totally different field and for different objectives. I want to move people emotionally so they can have insights into themselves or their lives with impact considerably more powerful and effective than the clinical insight patients get in psychotherapy. I want impact that strikes below the belt, under the skin, beneath the surface of consciousness. This would mean impact more appropriately classed under art. Intellectual insight is too frail. When it comes, it swims on the surface of thought and hardly dives deep enough to change the ocean bottom where the reside the structures that shape most of our lives.
I don't make as much progress as I wish I could make in part because I am torn between learning the technical craft of software and the craft of artistic creation. I need to focus on learning more creative ways of compositing and processing images, while spending some part of my daily schedule continuing to learn the software and shooting technology.
Last Tuesday I thought I should go back to the idea of learning to create effective commercial images and videos. I am not interested in doing weddings or events photography. If I want to make money by early next year, I need to revive my aspirations for commercials and corporate videos. To reach that goal I shall need to shoot and process more videos. It’s this simple when you’re at the very bottom rung of the ladder that you want to climb.
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