Wow, I love this rig! Here’s a quick look at the HandySLR, a very well-designed DSLR video support rig.
Video Rating: 4 / 5
As a woman films a mysterious wilderness lake and its swans, distinctions between fantasy and reality blur. Against impressionistic footage of the water and its swans, a range of off-screen observers — really personifications of the filmmaker’s thoughts — are heard. The filmmaker reads from her shooting diary and shapes a script, girls recount swan myths that cross world cultures, and “experts” from ancient times to modernity debate whether or not swans sing before they die. Over original watercolor illustrations, the woman spins her own tale of an orphan swan that spends its time observing palace parties from a garden and counseling the chickens in a coop with the wisdom it has acquired. Against this collection of onlookers, the real swans go about their lives and raise their young, their escapades pointing up a disparity between human observation and reality. Meanwhile, the film, as document of reality, becomes suspect: its wilderness setting vanishes, the woman’s filming notes reveal the subjectivity of her craft, and filmmaking tricks are revealed. Yet, as all the magic seems to disappear, events in the swans’ lives begin to resemble the filmmaker’s fairy tale and an eminent 19th-century ornithologist claims he’s heard a dying swan sing. Shot and finished on 16mm, the film is a hybrid of documentary, narrative, and experimental techniques. No humans appear on screen. For information on viewing the entire 52-minute film, please visit: www.resonantimages.com
Video Rating: 0 / 5