Editor's View: Inspiration Strikes

By: 

Cristina Clapp

Working in video production, there are a lot of processes: You’re recording, ingesting, rendering, encoding, transcoding, uploading. You’re evaluating capabilities, compatibilities and configurations. That’s what it is to be a video professional.

Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a 24-hour single-channel video montage constructed from thousands of moments in cinema and television history depicting the passage of time. Marclay excerpted each of these moments from their original sources and edited them together to create a functioning timepiece synchronized to local time wherever it is viewed—marking the exact time in real time for the viewer for 24 consecutive hours. (If you’re on the East Coast, The Clock will be screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art starting December 21.)

You’re also working in the most versatile and astonishing medium, and in addition to being a firmware installer, you can make anything. I know it’s a challenge to reconcile the everyday business of video with the art of video. “Art?” laughed one of my friends, who’d just returned from a documentary shoot in Alaska, when I brought this up. “I just want to keep water out of my lens and the bears away from my trail mix!”

But you should try to make time for your brain to, ahem, upgrade its firmware. A lot of people wedge some inspiration into their day: A quick time-lapse break or an imaginative OK GO! video during lunch. I was recently interviewing an editor and heard the very distinct “William Tell Overture” in the background. I asked what he was working on and he confessed, “Oh, I’m just sneaking in some Clockwork Orange while the render finishes.”

So try to get a side order of art to accompany your main course of technology and business. Your skills, ahem, pay the bills, but your talent and capabilities can take you anywhere.

Designed by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin to work in Google’s Chrome browser, “This Exquisite Forest” is an interactive web site that allows users to add on to each other’s animations using certain themes and parameters. The result is a “forest” of work that draws inspiration from a collective creativity: www.thisexquisiteforest.com.

For Valtari, the new album from band Sigur Rós, filmmakers and artists have created experimental videos to accompany each song. Titled “The Valtari Mystery Film Experiment,” the collection can be viewed here.

 

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