Friday, July 9, 2010

You Are Calling - insight into the making of the video

Karishma, my camera.
Karishma means "Miracle" in Sanskrit. True to her name, life-changing miracles (reaching a wide range of people) have come through the work that I've done with her.
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The decision has been made to not show any snippets of the You Are Calling video or post any of Carole Anne's images until the night of the launch later this month of Irukandji's new CD: Beauty In Destruction.

Over the past week, interviews with Irukandji and Carole Anne were featured. They spoke about the music/CD and some behind-the-scenes photography respectively.

Now I will say a few words on the video, which I directed/shot/edited.

I was at Irukandji's studio one day and he offered to play me a track from his new album-in-progress. From the moment he started to play "You Are Calling", the hair on my skin rose (the sign for me that something is 'right') and images started to flash in my head ... although, it wasn't so much of a physical seeing of images as it was a sense of something in the music that wanted to be translated visually.

How I work is that I rarely start with anything concrete. I prefer to go with what I sense until it becomes concrete. It's as if there is something already there and I am facilitating and creating the space for it to unfold in the way that it is meant to - rather than me forcing it to be what I think it should be. This involves constantly surrendering to the process, letting go of what does not serve it and moving on in synchronicity with what flows. The more the 'product' materializes, the more I am able to see it and help shape it consciously into what it eventually becomes.

There are some videos/films for which the process of creation doesn't feel like just "shooting a video/film". There is something else going on - symbolic, energetic workings on various levels. It's as though creating the video is creating life. Editing the footage is editing life. This video was definitely one of those. The process of shooting and where it took us, the process of editing and what was cut out to allow what was created - all along, I felt that these things were happening for all of us on our 'real life' physical plane as well.

This call for twenty women for the first part of the shoot (which I called "the Magic Shoot") was the first element that got the video moving. There was a definite female energy - largely inspired by the abstract female voice which calls throughout the song. There was something flowing, sacred and elemental about it - collectively giving birth to something bigger than we are. When I saw it unfolding before me as I edited, I thought "Wow ... something magical really happened when we did this."

Each person who sees the video will get different messages from it. Among other things, I see female power, magic, freedom, rebirth, the shedding of the old to enable the new, flight, a coming together, synchronicity, a blooming, the microcosm moving the macrocosm ... and vice versa.

STAY TUNED for details on the launch of Irukandji's CD: Beauty In Destruction. Also featuring:
* Soul-stirring electronica grooves by DJ Kasaya

* Screening of You Are Calling Video by Elspeth Duncan
* Music-driven slide-show of behind-the-scenes images by Carole Anne Ferris

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