The digital (PDF/EPUB) version of my new book Material Media-Making in the Digital Age is available now! Head to the Intellect site to purchase (or tell your institution’s library to do so!).
Exciting!
The cover of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age.
From the blurb:
“How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one’s disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging, as well as thinking through time, editing, sound, and the stream, Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice.”
That’s a wrap on The Debrief! Thanks to the incredible cast and crew. Super fun to shoot something that is truly single location, in real-time. Filmed theatre FTW! Now into the edit…
as part of current writing work, I’m going to *attempt* to create a video a day for the next fortnight (at least). they will be short, largely nonsensical, personal, abstract, unpolished, perhaps sometimes vloggy in nature
A week ago, I posted this on Twitter. Must’ve been something of a shock to my Twitter followers, as I haven’t really used that social platform in quite some time.
The push to take up this challenge came partly from current research — I’m looking into Casey Neistat’s vlog practice for an article — but also partly from a need to kickstart my own creative practice. The short film we shot in July last year has sat pretty well dormant in post-production for over a year, and I’d barely touched any kind of creative software during that time.
I needed to get back into shooting, back into editing, back into writing, to get myself back up to speed with both the gear, the software, and with my own creativity.
The video-a-day thing hasn’t worked: I don’t think it trucks too well with a full-time job, relationships, family and such, but I’ve done five thus far, and fully intend to keep going, shooting and cutting whenever I can, until I reach the promised fourteen videos.
It’s been enormous fun: sometimes shooting new stuff, sometimes delving into the archives, always cutting something new, something fresh. Recording voiceover and featuring myself in the videos is not easy: as much as the challenge emerged from analysing vloggers, I don’t really want to be the main focus. That said, I received some feedback that the voiceover would lend itself well to a video essay, which may well be one of the videos to come.
Creativity begets creativity
On Monday, a few days into the challenge, I opened Final Draft for the first time in a year and smashed out the first draft of a short film I’ve been thinking about for a long time. And I think a few colleagues and I are going to shoot it — quick’n’dirty style — late next week, so expect an upcoming video to be something of a behind the scenes.
The producer of last year’s film and I are also spending three hours in an edit suite tomorrow, to finish off this damn short. Nothing like time pressure.
Don’t sweat it
Perfection is overrated. I think this is a lesson from Casey. But I’m learning to not kill myself over the edits, over colour correction, over getting the timing or the music just right. Do it quick, get it done — the satisfaction of a completed video far outweighs the hours you may have spent to get things perfect.
More reflections, hopefully to follow, but for now, here’s the playlist…
Edie Brickell’s Good Times, one of two music videos that were included with Windows 95.
The disc for the Windows 95 operating system shipped with two music videos: Edie Brickell’s Good Times and Weezer’s Buddy Holly. These two videos were included to demonstrate how much digital video technology had advanced. Squinting through the pixels today to attempt to discern the image, it’s a wonder anyone thought digital video worth developing beyond that point.
One of Peter McKinnon’s latest videos demonstrates how you can bring a multicam setup into Premiere Pro and then edit between all cameras in real time. Vision switching has been a thing in live (and even recorded TV) for quite some time, but I find it crazy that processors can now handle real-time 4K video mixing.
Twenty years is a long time, but it’s also no time at all.
Sometimes it’s the movement. Just the movement. As the light hits a blade of grass, or a leaf — something that’s completely out of a cinematographer’s control.
Sometimes it’s the perfect placement of a vaguely recognisable object — like a syringe, or a coin, or a calendar page — just below the surface of a liquid such that it shimmers ethereally.
Sometimes it’s the way you’re cued to recognise each of three craniums at varying stages of baldness.
Sometimes it’s the crease of a wrinkle, the way a brow furrows, the tiniest glimmer of a smirk.
It’s a character breaking the fourth wall an hour into a film and it somehow feeling like the most natural thing in the world.
It’s rain falling completely out of nowhere, indoors, for no reason.
It’s a little girl, apropos of nothing, moving a couple of glasses with her mind.
And sometimes, just sometimes, it’s all of these things.
Words that I’ve not had the utter, utter privilege and luck to utter in what is rapidly approaching six years.
We have shot our little short film, and it was such a joy to see it come together. The crew were superb, and professional, and I look forward to working with them again very soon.
My cast were absolute professionals, and lovely, lovely people to boot. This shoot, I was able to just focus on them, and their wellbeing; not to mention the emergence of their characters, that they fleshed out and to which they gave life from my pitiful typed text.
I am incredibly happy, and satisfied, and humbled. Dear film-gods, let’s not leave it this long until next time.
