Moontravels

¡Cuy!

hpmoon — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 05:43:23 GMT

I have a long history of adventure traveling with portable filmmaking gear that fits in a backpack, but yields cinematic quality with the immediacy of documentary style. My work, with examples at www.zenviolence.com, is focused on world cultures and environmental style. The WorldNomads scholarship would empower a more focused expedition to produce a work that potentially might reach a larger audience, drawing attention to a unique culture and place. I'm up for it!

¡Cuy!

hpmoon — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:47:00 GMT

A little while ago, I set my thirteen-year-old nephew up with some modest facilities for composing electronic music, in a redux of my sullen childhood. He came back with a "debut album," so: for the occasion of his fourteenth birthday (and also to terrorize his younger sister, like any good uncle), I couldn't resist cutting this short little video to his music. I had just filmed it in the small village of Tipón a few kilometers outside Cusco, Perú - the world's "spiritual center" of cuy, at the particular haven best known for...what you'll see in the video.

(Not for the squeamish, and definitely not for anyone who has guinea pigs as cuddly pets. Like my niece.)

My Video scholarship 2010 entry

hpmoon — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:00:00 GMT

I am submitting this video at some risk of failing the challenge. There are no people in it to evince our human/animal experience. Still, at the time when I shot it, our human community was gripped with one of those occasional reminders of nature’s power, when a volcano in Iceland crippled our ability to travel. And we saw plentiful footage of the volcano spewing steam and lava, yet all of it seemed distant like the spectacle of a castle.

When I traveled to Guatemala during this eruption in Iceland, I had the rare opportunity to inch as close as possible to Volcán Pacaya’s lava flows, just outside the colonial city of Antigua. In this truest example of technology’s graces, I left behind my camcorder and brought a portable camera that performed just as well. I planned for the footage to be as stable and lush as possible, minding contrast against tourism videos. Stabilizing the camera was a challenge, since the heat would always overwhelm after just a few seconds; rather than masking those reactions in editing, I decided to keep them as stylized transitions. (It made international news, only a few weeks after my visit, when the volcano erupted causing loss of life and major disruption.)

My ambition as a documentary filmmaker is to expand the heritage of narrative storytelling through artistic, stylized means using an environmental visual language; the examples of Terrence Malick and Godfrey Reggio come to mind. Travel Video Scholarship 2010 would pull me deeper into the human experience so that I might better integrate this ambition with close-up anthropology and global understanding.

I am an enthusiastic, adventurous traveler who would treasure this incredible opportunity to be mentored and exposed, as I would blog my way through the journey with daily insights (I love to write, too). I am new to this field and I have much to learn!

Photos: Volcán Pacaya, Guatemala

hpmoon — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:00:00 GMT

Volcán Pacaya is an active volcano in the Escuintla department of Guatemala nearby Antigua and Guatemala City. Though the volcano had been dormant for over a century, it erupted in 1965 and hasn't stopped since. As recently as 2006, increased eruptions resulted in the formation of a lava river as you will see in this short film. When capturing the footage, the heat was so intense that I could only hold out for brief shots, needing to turn away regularly to avoid getting scorched. Rather than covering those reactions, I have retained them in editing, as harsh cuts at once stylized and truthful (or comical, if the idea of getting sizzled makes you giggle).

Costa Rica

hpmoon — Sat, 5 Sep 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Video travelogue of my journey across Costa Rica in the second week of September 2009.

Although the get-up is somewhat goofy, it was a nice way to practice and refine my video editing chops for future documentary/narrative endeavors. I'm also fond of the way that Juana Molina's songs complement the adventure of the first half ("Un Día"), and particularly the second half ("Vive Solo") which posits the Thoreauvian solitude of her lyrics - and my voyage - against the friendly backdrop of Nature and her creatures.

Moscow

hpmoon — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:00:00 GMT

During the Orthodox Holy Week in 2009, I took a spontaneous pilgrimage of sorts to Russia. Moscow now is an extraordinary place to visit, so soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. Her dramatic renewal of religious expression awkwardly mingles with a generation that never knew God. Standing as you do during Orthodox worship, I could find to my left a woman covered in traditional lace head-dress, then to my right a leather-jacketed man with bloodshot eyes reeking from a binge-drunken night. Russian Orthodoxy feels all at once like the most solemnly antiquated religion in the world, yet a fresh sort of witness to this society suddenly colliding with Western appetites.

Because digital video so recently became a guerilla possibility in today's Russia that remains utterly Kremlin, I was able to shoot lush high-definition 1080p footage even within Moscow's fortress, her Red Square, and anywhere else a military guard did not catch me stabilizing the camera (and when I got caught, I moved along quickly). Even though editing often involves a bag of tricks including audio substitution, the last two sound cues are in sync from the field, of matins in a Red Square church, and the pealing bells that begin the all-night vigil from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior - recently rebuilt in less than a decade, years after the Revolution when Stalin blasted it into rubble.