Eolaí’s Studio

Eolai from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Necessity is the mother of invention. The short video you see above is the result of keeping an open mind in a situation that didn’t exactly turn out as planned.

Thanks to Liam for allowing me into his studio again. I love his work and it’s a real privilege to get to sit with creative people like him while they do what they do. I’m experimenting with audio slideshows, video and other multimedia at the moment, and he agreed a while ago to be a guinea pig. It was a busy time for him too, as he was preparing for the Irish Blog Awards where he’ll be exhibiting.

Thanks also to the Redneck Manifesto for allowing me use their music for backing.

Some words on the production of the video over the fold.

I met artist @Eolaí (Liam Daly) at his studio during the week, with the intention of doing an audio slideshow proper, so I was armed with cameras, lenses, audio recorder, the whole shebang. I snapped away in the dodgy light of his studio, lit by a flourescent bulb and, effectively, a few holes in the wall. We did a short interview. I checked the 130 pics I had shot and reckoned I had the goods in the bag.

But something about the audio didn’t hang, and the sound quality wasn’t what I wanted, even though the quotes were golden. And at this stage, I was at home with other work looming and no real way to recapture the conversation we had shared.

So I listened to it again, and picked some of the narrative from the conversation, and started to see where it might fit with the images. And I started to crop the images, too, firstly for the aspect ratio I wanted, and then to isolate moments within the pics.

In iMovie, I started experimenting with captions and their placement on the frames, and the story began to fall into place. Incidentally, I’d be keen to hear from people on why Slideshare is favoured for audio slideshows when something like iMovie is probably ten times easier to manipulate and embed. I have both. I rarely use Slideshare now. Anyway, I digress.

Next came music. I have a few bands on my wall of CDs that do  instrumental stuff, and for a slow piece you wouldn’t usually pick the Redneck Manifesto, a-hard-rockin’ as they are. But when I went looking for something about 2 minutes long, there was Arbus, sitting softly on the album ThirtySixStrings. It has a lovely bit of background noise to it. Some traffic noise, coughing, creaking chairs. It just fit nicely.

Lastly, I tweaked the captions to make them work a little better with the ebb and flow of the music. And, voilá.

The moral of the story is, when you can’t see stories in what you’ve got, look harder. Like Eolaí’s colours, they’re in there.