oh yeah i made this
The Other Kind of Magic : The Remix by Juliet Escoria from Juliet Escoria on Vimeo.
VIDEO #7: CONFUSION
Story was originally published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn here.
Beach Sloth wrote about it here.
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To make the video, I took the story, cut the text, cut it again, and then cut that up using Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique (or, if you’d rather, William S. Burroughs’). The video was filmed here. I had a lot of fun making it; was super enjoyable to rip everything apart and put it back together again (both with the footage and the text). Scott McClanahan helped me with the filming, and that was nice too.
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Interesting to have made seven videos… I had originally, way back when, intended to do only three. I didn’t even know what I wanted those to look like— I knew I wanted to do a music video-feeling one for Mental Illness… (Video #1), and to talk about my experiences with psych meds and show me puking (Video #2). Video #3 was supposed to have a rap video type feel but it ended up turning into something Lynchian.
Somewhere along the way of me sending out my book to various places, the three videos changed to twelve, one for each of the stories in Black Cloud. I think this was a mistake that someone else had said to someone else who was not me. When this came back to me, I thought “Haha, yeah right. That sounds hard as shit.”
Then I decided to send my book to an agent who had contacted me long ago, back when I was supposedly writing a novel. I knew Black Cloud didn’t have “Big 5 Commercial Appeal”, but an agent sounded cool and who cares about being honest to agents, so I tried to sell it to her with that lie, and a few other tricks added in. She seemed to like the work, but rather honestly told me she had no idea how to market it.
But typing that lie to that agent did something. Making 12 videos did sound hard as shit (I had zero experience with making/editing videos). But it also sounded fun. I’ve always liked making visual art, and had let it fall by the wayside when I decided to concentrate on writing. And… I don’t know. I’d always wanted to make music videos. I was seeing all this cool stuff happen around me on the internet, with macros and other visual mediums. And I’d never heard of anyone attempting to do anything like this before.
The whole process, so far, has been really really fucking awesome and I’d like to encourage anyone who is thinking of doing something like it to go ahead and do it. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. That’s part of the fun. I’m figuring out how to work the software as I go, figuring out what kind of shots look cool. I rarely have known what a video was going to look like until I started making it. I’ve freaked out a couple times, thinking that I’d run out of ideas, but so far this has only been a temporary problem.
Five more to go. I’ve got an idea for the 8th one, but no clue what will happen for the 9th-12th. I’d love to collaborate more with people; that was one of the initial things that appealed to me about making videos — that I could work with other people, and I could talk to them and go outside. With the videos, I’ve been able to go out and do dumb shit like crawl in the sand and spit blood and it is a whole lot of fun. (Like, the Grunion Run video footage is especially funny to watch, because me and Sunny are giggling and giggling, in between trying to look scary.) I’ve got to have some sweet musical groups let me use their songs. But I’d like to push it further, let someone else’s ideas bleed into my own. (Not that Sunny & Scott, the two people who’ve helped me with the filming, didn’t give me ideas, because they did. But you know. I just am interested in more smooshing of other people’s ideas in general.)
For the record, I am not using any fancy equipment. I either use my iPhone or a point-and-shoot Canon. When I use the iPhone, I sometimes use the 8mm app, which costs $3.99. To edit, I switch back and forth (depending on what I’m doing) between Windows Live Movie Maker (free with my computer) and the free version of VideoPad Video Editor.
