Autumn Pieces 02: Calshot Castle
Now that Autumn has arrived, I want to carry on what I loved about the Summer Shorts series: finding a place, composing piece of music and making an accompanying short film.
The past few weeks have been exceptionally busy for me. The start of a new school year is always busy, but in my new role as project manager for the M-Tech project I have had some of the busiest weeks I can remember. It's been rewarding but exhausting.
Making time to go out and create these Autumn Pieces (and the Summer shorts before that) has become almost a ritual for me now. The boost that I get from the creative release is infectious. There is something mindful about heading out in to an unknown space and creating my own space within in: through the camera lens and through channeling my focus from the world around me in to the music I compose.
I took my GoPro again, and whilst most of the time-lapse video footage didn't come out as well as I hoped, some of the pictures I really loved, particularly this one that I took as I sat over the castle moat, staring in to the glassy pool of water below.
The other thing I have noticed over the past two weekend is how much better my iPhone 7 camera is than my iPhone 6 camera, and, even the disposable Instagram story pictures I took became some more of my favourites from the afternoon.
The music for this piece took multiple restarts before finding an idea that I liked enough to develop in to a full piece. Bob Dylan famously said to write ten songs a day and throw nine away. In a world of digital iteration, finishing nine bad songs doesn't seem like the right approach, but the spirit of trying, and trying again, is one worth remembering when finding new ideas seems illusive.