In this week’s workshop we filmed some static footage around Melbourne for an editing exercise, pairing the footage with a haiku poem. Above is my attempt, titled The Galaxy.

Compiling this footage into a short film was surprisingly fun. I wanted to try to build some sort of narrative from the naturally narrative-free bits and pieces in the collection, if possible, and I think I managed to do that by piecing together the clips in such a way that implies someone travelling to the State Library. It’s not particularly complex, but to be able to build even a simple narrative out of a random collection of static clips shows the power of editing.

A lovely thing to see:
through the paper window’s hole,
the Galaxy.

I chose this haiku because it’s evocative of the sheer size of the galaxy and how, by simply looking up at the night sky, we can see objects that are an incomprehensibly long distance away. We can actually see further than we could ever hope to travel in our lifetimes (or anyone’s lifetime, really). In my film I tried to draw a parallel between the subject of the haiku and the feeling I get when I’m in a library: that there are so many stories and worlds and characters contained within all the books in a library (paper windows) that I could never even get close to reading them all.