This is me walking through the Alps and fields of daffodils. We did the first half of our Kickstarter filming today with the green screen and treadmill we got on craigslist for $100.
We’ll finish up tomorrow with Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth standing with her brother near Tintern Abbey, and the Ancient Mariner himself, talking about “Water, water, everywhere,/And all the boards did shrink./Water, water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink.”
Then we add in these daffodils:
And these Alps:
We all know making a movie’s a lot of work. Even those of us who have no desire to make one. But it’s been interesting to learn how much work goes into preparing to make a movie.
Today was fun, because I got to wear knickers and knee socks, and dwell on the fact that tomorrow we’ll be filming the first bit of footage that gets us on the road to making Swimming with Byron.
It’s the first step of preparation, really, because it’s a video for a Kickstarter project. Our project requires location filming, and to get there, we have to raise the funds. So, unlike many crowdfunding projects you see, ours doesn’t have any early footage to show. We hope it’ll show the idea and the passion.
And knickers. Continue reading “Kickstarter video filming starts tomorrow”
I just saw that I have 99 followers on this blog.
Should I offer a prize for the 100th? Who’s it going to be? When’s it going to happen? I’m busting with anticipation.
A big thanks to all of you who are reading. I almost put “by the way” at the end of that, but it’s “by the way” at all. We all sit in rooms and write alone, with the hope – that hope we try to pretend we aren’t really feeling – that someone’s out there reading. Getting to 100 followers and who knows how many readers doesn’t put me in major blog category, actually, but I like all of you, lots.
Look soon for a linked blog to the production company I’m forming to make my first full-length documentary film, Romantic Places. I have to change that title. As I re-read Byron’s Childe Harold, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Shelley’s Frankenstein, the other Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge,” and so many others in preparation for the film, I’m hoping a phrase will jump out and say “I’m your title.”
Like the Romantic sublime, this post comes to you a bit delayed. Wordsworth put it either best, or just most famously:
Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
We questioned him again, and yet again;
But every word that from the peasant’s lips
Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
Ended in this, — ‘that we had crossed the Alps’.
Imagination — here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say —
“I recognise they glory.”
I wrote about travelling to find what he was trying to find once here. But that’s not what this post’s point.
A few people came over the other night for no particular reason, but when the date was set for July 13, I couldn’t help thinking about Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” or, more correctly: “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, upon revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798.”
When I visited Tintern Abbey it was closed. I didn’t know you could close a ruin, but you can. So I went along the Wye and looked at it. That was more in the spirit of Wordsworth’s poem, so I didn’t really mind.
I tried to feel
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
It didn’t happen there. That took a few more years and a trip to the Alps, where Wordsworth missed the sublime in 1792. He’s the better poet of the two of us, but I’m the better sublime-finder.
Last night had nothing to do with Wordsworth, in the end. Good friends, good food, some Jackson 5, and Earth, Wind and Fire at the end.
So what I’m saying is that turned into more of a Coleridge evening than a Wordsworth one. But I think I’ll celebrate Tintern Abbey Day every year from here on.
Parkinson's Disease Diary 