Thursday, September 15, 2016

On recording a video of a sonnet

When you spend all morning recording videos of a monologue; deleting at least half of them, uploading 9 of them, and then deciding that maybe the first one was the best one after all.  This is Shakespeare's sonnet 18, btw.

v1 — from my right, very pleasant, but looking down at the camera 



v2- from my left, looking down at camera, too much neck












v 3 - from left, shoulders only, fairly pleasant — not as audible. I was trying different tables and decided that this one was too high, while the one for the first two was too low.


So for the rest of these I used the first table with the lid of a cardboard box under the ipad.

v4 - from left, more arms, getting poutier, less pleasant, mug bouncing 



v5 - starts pleasant, ends pretty angry looking — loud traffic noise near end 



v6 - no smiles, from left, still looking down — expressions perhaps a bit exaggerated 


v7 — a bit grouchy at the end 


v8 — no traffic noise — pounding looks a bit fake — too much neck 



v9 pounding on death looks fake — traffic noise at end 



If you've gotten this far and actually watched these videos, you're a saint.  Please let me know which you like best.

Then, of course, I find there's some incompatibility which prevents me from transferring these videos from my ipad to my computer. Why?  They're both Apple products.  Uggh.  I think I saw a software update coming through for the mac.  Maybe I need to do that.  In any case, the only way I can look at all of them is to upload them to YouTube, as unpublished videos -- but then, once I get them up there I think, I might as well share them all.

I could download them and enhance the audio on my computer. 

Anyway, the sonnet talks about summer days and it was lovely out on my balcony and I wanted to try out my new sun umbrella, which I think worked very nicely here...

In the mean time, I'm not cooking this huge pork shoulder I bought and not learning the lines I need to memorize by Monday.

*****

Addendum: 

Just a word of background. 

I attended SETC this past weekend.  The organizers suggested that we should have at least 3 contemporary monologues and at least 3 classical monologues ready.  I only had one classical monologue memorized here, so I learned 2 more.  This was one of them.

I shall do a YouTube video (or perhaps several) of the other shortly.

=====

Second addendum:

I started reading Shakespeare when I was about 10, when I found my mother's college Shakespeare book on a shelf.  I had no trouble with the language, because I was raised in the Episcopal church, where we were still using the Book of Common Prayer that had Elizabethan English in it, so that dialect was familiar to me.  

I'm sad they've let that book and the King James version of the Bible go.  I have heard that studying those versions encourages mysticism, which I happen to be very fond of.  

In any case, this sonnet was my favorite at that time.  I think I was mostly captivated by the first four lines.  I mostly ignored the later lines.

Now, when I read them, I'm thinking that Shakespeare was really not a humble man, being so certain of the immortality of his poetry.  He turned out to be right, but it was a bit of hubris to be thinking so at the time that he wrote it.

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