Today I’m going to talk about a subject I truly struggle with: social media. Remembering to document my work as I go along is difficult at best. I’m so caught up in the actual work, I often don’t think to stop and take photos along the way, much less shoot video while I’m working. It’s a real shift in mindset, one that I am trying to work on. I even post little reminders around the studio and office to myself.
Part of it though is technical. Just setting up equipment to shoot while I work is both weird and right now seems difficult. Do I just run a camera non-stop in my studio? That’s a lot of video to have to sort through and compile into something meaningful. Not to mention the volumes of space that would take up. I guess I don’t understand how people do it. Stopping to reconfigure or even just set up shots takes away from the flow and momentum in the studio. I move from spot to spot so much in my work. A little on a whaleship, and then move on to some stuff on a pair of goggles, then a time machine and flit over to a painting for a while. All of this jumping around is a necessary way of working for me. While one thing dries, cures or otherwise needs time and space, another thing can be worked on in the studio.If I did’t I’d turn out one piece a year. LOL.
Right now my main set up consists of a couple of “top down” areas over my work tables. A simple homemade solution of rigging up a board to lay my phone on to film onto my worktables. While I have taped off the area the camera covers on the work table, I often find myself working out of frame, which is not great, or just plain forgetting to turn on the video altogether.
The other set up I use is my phone mounted on a tripod to film while I paint. This set up has many problems. If it’s close enough to just be the painting, it’s very much in my way. If I pull back on the set, its too much of me in the frame, which is not what I’m trying to capture.
I am open to suggestions, I need someone to teach me a better way.
From the Mechanical Insects Series
Shots in progress from the latest iteration of a Whaleship
