Chatty

Yeah. Whatever, I was sitting here browsing the interweb when Madonnas jump came on the tv in the background. MTV. Yay. I haven't seen the video so I glance over, I see people jumping across rooftops and stuff like that. I guess it's still trendy. I don't bother to look at it. But something has already clicked. I can't keep looking away. Why? I stand up and go to the tv. The video is shot outdoors in daylight. The colours are natural. Yes. That's it, I try to remember the last music video I saw that was actually colortimed to look right(as opposed to kewl). Blurry images of a 1980s ultravox video shot on 35 pass me by, Vienna? Yeah.

I watch the video till it's over. I stare at it, getting drunk on the gorgeous imagery, it looks like Hal Hartley on a happy day. The images are still playing back on my inner screen. The video has an interesting dance sequence with Madonna, I get particulary intrigued by what she does when "I can make it alone" is echoing. It looks like she is mimicking the dancing of "lonely"[meaning just not with someone right now] people. It rings with a peculiar resonance in me and I know there is more, the pattern is deep and deliberate. I must watch this video again, funny though. The previous videos from that album haven't clicked with me. Production quality was obvoiusly through the roof but I'm not really interested in that.

Thinking about it, sorting past influences in my mind I suddenly land on Stanley Kubrick. The most colour accurate director in the history of film.

You see, getting accurate colours is not a creative choice, it's what all DPs and photographers in general are trying to do most of the time(I suppose colour accuracy was a creative choice for Kubrick given the extreme lenghts he would go to to get it right). And most of the time most of them fail. Colourtiming will fix flaws and deficiencis but it is not magic, you can only go so far. Ofcourse most imagemakers realizes this and opts for the second best, namely to have the same tint on all images. Me I'm leaning towards murky warm red orange brown thingies. One reason is that the cameras I'm working with is *never* under any circumstance going to deliver a colouraccurate image, it's not even going to come close. They're just too cheap. I know, I've taken thousands, no tens of thousands of pictures on film and as many on CCD. Hundreds of hours on video. And it's not like I haven't experimented.

It took a lens from NASA for Kubrick to shoot Barry Lindon. And though I find it boring(plotwise) I completely drown in the images. Extreme is to small a word for them.

anyway

b