I finally went and RECorded a few hours of Occupy Wall Street footage.  I'd like to gather a whole bunch of Occupy records.  Contribute your photos and videos of the movement.  Contribute your thoughts in written form or talk into your camera from home.  Write a song or a poem.  Draw a cartoon.  You know, be creative. 

All of my raw footage is going to be uploaded soon so check that out once it's there! 

Thanks again <3
J

In the middle of the night last night, NYPD decided to raid Zuccotti Park where the #OWS occupation had been centered, pretty much since it began.  I was heading to bed when I heard about it, but instead decided to grab my camera and head over there.  I ended up RECording about 3 hours raw footage.  This is just a small sampling of some of it.  I'll be releasing more soon.

I'd been chewing over various Occupy Wall Street video ideas for a while in my head, but around the time Joe posted his footage and started the collab I'd settled on the idea of putting the modern visuals with old audio. Initially I was going to do a mashup of great speakers, but I ended up not liking that a) they were all old white dudes and b) it made the whole thing feel very disjointed. Eventually I settled on the LBJ Great Society Speech that he gave at the University of Michigan commencement in 1964. (It's public domain even though the site says it might not be - I called the LBJ Library to check, because I'm that paranoid. As the very nice Texan librarians told me, "all presidential speeches should be in the public domain, so y'all should be okay using them".)This is partially because it's a great, relevant speech, and partially because I really enjoyed telling everyone who wanted a description of what I was working on that I was "basically going to Lydon B. the crap out of their Johnson".

Har, har, I'm hilarious.

Anyway, as always, everything's a work in progress, leave comments and suggestions, blah blah blah, et cetera.

(Note: Archive.org has a great selection of footage from OWS, and I used quite a bit of it. If you're curious, check the resources, I'll be putting a text record with a list of all the videos I used and links to them.)

First 15 seconds of this contain the shout out to OWS and the rest is Edward Shallow's readinf of "dead love"

First of all, a confession:  I haven’t watched any of the OWS remixes.  My apologies to RyanPatrick, Redheadedmonster and others who have done, what I imagine to be, great remixes so far.  I haven’t watched them because, while I think that seeing other remixes can be a great way to take what others have done and be inspired by them, I felt very strongly, in this case especially, that I needed to find my own voice within all of this footage.  I wanted to find out what I thought.

This was very much a labour of love for me.  One of the things that makes this subject and all of this amazing footage so difficult to remix is that you can’t skim through it.  There’s no hunting-and-pecking for the shots that you want.  You have to watch. And listen.

Another thing that makes it difficult in this case is that the footage belongs to someone else.  It would have been entirely different if I had been the one there filming it; I’d have my memory to fall back on and say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that someone said something that might be useful here…’.  Instead, it’s more of a ‘shared’ memory.  In order for me to have a memory of it, I had to relive it.

My goal with this video was to start out slowly and let it build and build until it nearly overheats.  Wirrow’s music is absolutely perfect for this;  that boy does know how to build up suspense and tension and excitement in his music.  However, because I think that the voice overs and descriptions are important, I want to save anyone the trouble of having to recreate it, so I’m going to upload a version without Wirrow’s beautiful music in the background.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough.  Thanks for reading (and watching).

<3