A day of burning heat. Awoke at 01:50 by a violent explosion of thunder which shook the house. The storms that followed were amazing to see, fantastically bright and terrifying fork lightning. The day remained blazing and too hot to venture outside.
Spent the morning converting and uploading the remaining three art videos, so five new films in total are all set to appear over the next five weeks. The Tower of Bees painting is due to be shown at the Bickerton Art Exhibition, so might even be sold before the video premieres, which is an interesting notion.
After that I started the account set-up process for Apple Artists. I will probably create a new channel for music videos, and will revisit all of my current videos and work out how to efficiently make new ones in high quality. The newer videos are far better than the few older ones, and grainy video experiments like the Mice or Chine Syndrome video were fun and useful at the time, but now seem horribly dated. The workload to remake some of these can be immense, so I must make the result artistically useful and engaging. The film quality of great films of the past like Un Chien Andalou or Nosferatu is irrelevant compared to their artistic quality, so I must aim for a video that captures some technical and contemporary psychological zeitgeists, as well as complements then music.
I remember updating the ultra-complicated Challenger video before. Now the script seems remarkably simple. The experiences of ArtSwarm have truly been good training for video creation, which was the primary role of ArtSwarm. It is this that has led to my current renaissance in video.
Anyway, I was digressing. I was amazed to find out that Challenger was still in V.G.A. quality, rather than H.D. so I spent the evening updating the graphics to 1280x720 and preparing to cross my fingers for the mammoth graphics render of this. At any point, memory might give way on a project like this. One option is to render the separate components as separate films, then overlay them rather than do it all in one process. It takes about two hours for my computer to build this video. I will wait for a cooler time. It's simply too hot to subject the computer to such fan whizzing. Here is a still from the H.D. version.
Meanwhile I will start storyboarding for new videos and try my best with my limited resources. I really need my old camera cleaning and its damaged lens fixing, but we must work with the poor tools we have, and with our magic fingers and minds, produce wonders. Limitations are so often beneficial.
