"Four Rons: My Block" (click thumbnail or here to watch .wmv video - 5.1 MB, 1.30 Min.)
I was sitting around thinking of vlog stories a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to do something with music. I wanted to start with a simple idea, and for some reason started to think about the street that I live on in Sunnyvale. A tune sort of hatched in my head at that point, hammer beat on cogwheel, and the Four Rons were born. I hope you enjoy this weird result. All Rons sing, and one of the Rons is also drumming on his calf. I wish they would get along a little better sometimes. :)
The file size is bigger than most - I found some weird effects with Windows Media Player. Although each image was set to .25 sec, the final file would skip over some frames. I had to lower the compression to get it to behave. If anyone knows what happened, let me know! I've only seen it with 100+ images being rendered in this sort of sequence.
"Trains" (click thumbnail or here to watch .wmv video - 3.5 MB, 1 Min.)
I just got back from a big 7-countries-in-3-weeks trip to Europe, and am slowly going through some of the stills and video I shot. I decided to play around a bit with all of the scenes I shot from trains moving to and from the different countries, and some music was stuck in my head from a Charlie Brown special that was on TV the other night. I like the way they go together - sort of, well, a transient feeling. :) Video shot in Austria, Poland, and Hungary. Music by David Benoit.
"Test - St. Charles' Bridge" (click thumbnail or here to watch .wmv video - 2.5 MB, 1 Min.)
Here is a test video from the trip - St. Charle's Bridge, Prague. The Dixieland music playing in the background is from the band in the shot, recorded live by the camera. Dixieland music in the Czech Republic!
In her book, The World of Storytelling, authorAnne Pellowski has suggested that storytelling had its origin in play activities, with gifted but ordinary folk entertaining their particular social group informally. Gradually these activities were included in religious rituals, historical recitations, and educational functions. She found evidence to support many theories on the origins of storytelling, including:
(1.)That it grew out of the playful, self-entertainment needs of humans;
(2.)That it satisfied the need to explain the surrounding physical world.
(3.)That it came about because of an intrinsic religious need in humans to honor or propitiate the supernature force(s) belived to be present in the world.
(4.) That it evolved from the human need to communicate experience to other humans.
(5.) That it fulfilled an aesthetic need for beauty, regularity, and form through expressive language and music.
(6.) That it stemmed from the desire to record the actions or qualities of one's ancestors, in the hope that this would give them a kind of immortality.
We all love stories. They allow us to wonder about avenues that we didn't take or are out of our realm of possibility, and free us to experience a different persepective. Those who tell these tales are called storytellers. Here are some of my experiments in becoming one.
