Sometimes I find myself caught up in the creative process of editing a video to the point where it competes with other responsibilities (and pleasures) in life, and possibly borders on obsession. Sitting at the computer in the late hours of the night manipulating individual frames and effects doesn’t feel like art – especially when it’s destined for 40 or 50 views on YouTube at best. And I wonder sometimes why we who practice this hobby do what we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes you have an idea, and you want to see if you can transfer that vision to a bit of visual storytelling. There’s no money in it, and sometimes there’s an immense amount of work involved with relatively little payoff. You sit down to make a 3-minute clip,and after 4 hours you take a break and realize you’ve managed to create a 10-second introduction. And then you work days and days and in the end it doesn’t really turn out quite as cool as you imagined, but maybe you’ve added another trick to your video editing repertoire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I look at something like this music video – in some ways a stupid, trivial set of visual tricks and I wonder if others have the same thoughts.\u00a0 Here’s this guy who has a vision for a music video for a techno piece, and he cuts and individually paints a few thousand brightly colored blocks of wood, builds some sort of photography apparatus, and then, photo by painstaking photo (4,085 in all), creates a 2 minute 49 second piece of “art” with questionable value in the big scheme of things.\u00a0 And I kind of know why he did it, but I can’t really articulate it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n