Creating with Intensity
Not Giving Up And Creativity, Doing Without Knowing, Bettina Perut and Iva Osnovikoff on Visual Language, FCPX Tool for SRTs, Clop for Optimization, Alpaca for Photoshop
Here’s some stuff worth sharing from my previous week:
On Creativity and Visuals
I read some thoughts about perseverance in creativity by director Joanna Hogg. A quote that stood out:
“It’s not really what you do, it’s more the intensity by which you do it. By the conviction of your reality that you believe in, you’ll make others believe in it. You kind of can’t make it up, really. And then people get convinced, and even oneself gets convinced.”
I read Austin Kleon talking about “not knowing” in the creative process. I found this quote John Higgs that resonated with me:
“It’s not a particularly fashionable idea right now but if you scratch any interesting artist you’ll hear that one of the key components to how they do it is that they don’t really know what they’re doing. […] If you don’t know what to expect, there’s a chance the listener and reader will find themselves in a place they wouldn’t expect to end up, that’s where interesting art resides.”
I watched this interview in Spanish with directors Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff. I have only watched “Los Reyes” from these directors, but wow, it was such an experience. I love observational documentary films that expand the concepts or “rules” of what is supposed to be done or not in documentaries. This interview I watched had some interesting insights on their process. Here’s a quote that talks about their approach to cinematography:
“Our fourth film focused on giving true importance to the visual aspect in parallel with the narrative. We aimed for the images to speak for themselves and sought different types of images and approaches to the human body. We fragmented the image and recognized the importance not only of a face, but also of expressive eyes, a mouth, and even the expressiveness of feet and hands. Therefore, we directed our attention to other visual elements…”
On Apps
Do you ever need to optimize and/or crop videos, images, gifs, pdfs? A few weeks ago I recommended Clop . I had just downloaded it after seeing a post on reddit and thought it was useful. Little did I know that I’d become so excited about a small utility like this. At that time I left some feedback to the developer and—while I didn’t expect much—he implemented pretty much all of my suggestions. A few days ago I shared THIS VIDEO showing the app in action, in case you missed it.
I finally caved in and am trying out the Eleven Labs “Starters” subscription. For $1 the first month I thought, why not? Not sure if I’ll continue with it, but I used it on that video mentioned above. I find it messes up with my accent, but other than that maybe it’s not so bad. They do offer a “Professional Voice Cloning” alternative in a higher subscription, which is supposed to be much better, but I don’t plan to go there (yet).
I wanted to find a way to convert SRT files to FCPX titles and found THIS FREE ONLINE TOOL. May be helpful to you if you are into editing.
I’m trying out Alpaca, an AI image generation plugin for Photoshop which is free while in Beta. It’s okay… but for speed and quality I still prefer Dall-e 3 with Bing. I had previously attempted to install a Stable Diffusion plugin to use in photoshop and this is definitely much better than that, and it’s convenient, but it’s just too slow.
On Films
Brewster McCloud (1970). I try to have an open mind when I watch films, but with this one, even having an open mind didn’t help a lot. And it’s not that it’s bad—or I wouldn’t recommend it here—but it’s just that it feels so out-of-the-box that it’s hard to define it or even follow along. It’s considered a cult-status film for a reason. Synopsis: Brewster is an owlish, intellectual boy who lives in a fallout shelter of the Houston Astrodome. He has a dream: to take flight within the confines of the stadium. Brewster tells those he trusts of his dream, but displays a unique way of treating others who do not fit within his plans.
Scrapper (2023). While it’s impossible not to compare it to the masterpiece Aftersun, because of the similarities in theme, I think this one was still pretty good. Kind of like a light hearted drama with some comedy elements to it. Synopsis: Living alone since her beloved mum died, 12-year-old Georgie fills the flat they shared with her own special magic. But when her absent father Jason turns up out of the blue, she’s forced to confront reality.
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