Following up from my previous post, here’s the latest of my Maracatu Nunca Antes videos
I’ve embedded this one, because it’s a relatively lightweight download at 15Mb.
As I spend the time in Final Cut, scrubbing back an forth in the footage, it’s amazing to me how much you begin to learn about the intricacies of group percussion like this. What I shot was with one mobile camera, and one fixed cam, but because of the big differences in quality between the two, I wanted to try to put together a sequence that was based solely on the better, moving cam.
That means, of course, that either I had to be able to create the most fluid, amazing and ever-frame great single sequence, or assemble the video from footage from several songs, and using whatever else as B-Roll.
That’s where it gets interesting editing percussion as intricate as the stuff that Maracatu, or, I’m sure samba or other massed percussion with so much going on. While it is all just percussion – and Maracatu tends to be in a relatively narrow tempo range – it in fact has a very strong specificity. Each drumming pattern can be simple, or sometimes quite complex, but the relationships between them, and the ease with which the human ear and eye can correlate them means that finding footage that ‘fits’ is pretty tough. The ability to slow down or accelerate the speed of the shot helps, sometimes, but less than I thought it would.
This reinforces the artificial nature of the moving image: the very task of trying to capture the fleeting reality of the moment, as soon as it combines with the ease with which different sequences can be associated means that an extraordinary level of artifice has to be part of the most ‘realistic’ or ‘accurate’ moving images of something that has the flow of life. And musical performance is a heightened state of life.
This makes me want to write more about something that has bothered me for a long time, and that is the sterility of contemporary recorded music, and maybe i will, soon.
But the other, shorter observation that I can make is that it is more important to recreate the excitement, or the mood of a performance than it is to insist that every frame be from the song or section of the performance that it seems to be from. The point for me is to try to build visual excitiment at the pace that the music builds excitement.
Maybe I’m getting closer: anyway, these are the results.
