Tag: quote visualization

I decided to participate in this week’s Sunday Funnies assignment along with y’all, so I made the video below to illustrate this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke:

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

 

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. Letter #8.

I recorded myself reading these two paragraphs using Audacity. Then loaded the audio as a base track in iMovie and layered the following photos over it:

• Here be Dragons.
• Heroscape: dragon stalks samurai
• Princesses
• Princesses 2
• helpless
• The Umquhile Shadow-Paraphernalia With Hands-on Ripening
• Cloudshadow
• Big Mouth
• Windows Vista

I created short links for each of those photos using bit.ly, so that I could easily include links in the credit page inside the video itself, in addition to listing them here.

I also added a layer of background music with a 1:00 excerpt of a piece by Phillip Glass, “Molly is a Dreamer” (from Theater Music Archive, Vol.I). The music is not in the public domain or Creative Commons licensed, so it’s possible that my video will be taken down if someone objects to it, but I believe that I’ve satisfied the requirements for Fair Use of a piece by only using a tiny sliver of Glass’s music, attributing the source, and using it only in a nonprofit and creative capacity.

When it was finished, I uploaded the video to YouTube and then embedded it into this post.