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!
