Maputo Time

I've made my first foray into film-making..  Well, timelapse is not exactly filmmaking, but it sounded good.  Anyway, here's a link to my first movie of sorts.. a short affair at 4 minutes, and done with about 12 "takes" that I've mostly strung together.  As soon as the "final" version was posted I came up with another idea using the telephoto to zoom in on the "action, and V2 was born, which makes quite a difference to the "story-line"..  And what is the story?  Well, remember that I come from a photographer's background, and making movies is still quite alien.  I don't feel very comfortable shooting movies, but the time-lapse feature in the camera feels more like photography, which is probably what attracted me to it. That and the film Chronos which I saw a few years ago and stayed with me ever since.  The poetry of speeding up nature and showing it's patterns is beautiful and humbling, and having that "power" with a camera quite intoxicating.  And some results are quite surprising.  Like taking a photograph in a cave and discovering an amazing shot (well, one amazing shot amongst several hundred out-of-focus ones)..

Now for the story.. Well, it's a bit difficult to create a story with time-lapse, at least it is for me, so I'll need a bit more practice to come up with something a bit more polished and captivting.  My feeling with the medium now is really just to capture as much as I can and work with what I've got, and try and make some sense of what is there.. a bit like collecting magazine pictures and trying to give them some coherence in a collage.  Basically though the rythmns of the sea and a port highway, with clouds and tides thrown in for good measure.

So what were the difficulties?  Sound mostly.  The image capture was pretty straight-forward, although a dirty sensor did spoil a few takes.  As I mentioned, the big epiphany between V1 (on the Vimeo site) and V2 was zooming into the boats moving on the harbour.  That elegant dance becomes the "plot" of the story.  As for the sound, V1 and V2 are completely different through the use of different sound-tracks, which make V1 more of an introspective moody short, whereas the slightly bouncy feel of the V2 track makes it more positive and, yes how "punny", up-beat.

No worries, there are no delusions of grandure here.  I simply had fun making it, and showing my kids the production process.  They won't learn to make movies by watching me once, but I hope they understand that they have the power to create, and that's a trait I hope they inherit.

So sit down, get the popcorn and the coke out and enjoy!


Version 1 posted on Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/80990358


Version 2 right here on Blogger:

And if the above embedded video is really horrible to watch, then try this link on Vimeo for V2:
https://vimeo.com/81060075