This weekend was a blast, and this is why: before I came to UMW, I spent my freshman year at Sweet Briar College in Amherst, VA; the institution has gorgeous grounds and wonderful faculty, but the overall size was a bit too small for my taste. Regardless, during my time there, I met some of my best friends. One of which is a firecracker of a young lady who was able to come and visit me here at UMW for a few days! She always puts a smile on my face and is truly a breath of fresh air–especially during this stressful almost-finals-time.
When we weren’t running around the city doing this-or-that, we decided we would try and get some homework done (spoiler: we did not get any homework done). She loves photography and has a very nice camera, and I mentioned the last video assignment I was working on for this week: one second of beauty. I suggested we go out and explore–well, as much exploring as is possible in this FINALLY freezing weather!–the area for pretty sights. That way, she could snap some pictures and I could grab some video to draw from later on my computer. She agreed. Inspired by one of the shots in the example used in the assignment description, I was thinking I would go the sunset/Golden Hour route and try to capture some fallen leaves and their colors.
On Saturday, the Bell-A-Cappella concert was showing on campus for free. My friend and I were in choir together while at Sweet Briar, so I figured it would be fun to take her to see the show. After running a few errands and grabbing some food, we headed to the auditorium for an musical treat!
I have seen Bell-A at least twice before thanks to their Halloween and Spring shows (the Halloween Crayola Crayon group costume was too clever), and I was fairly familiar with their new set. I did not expect, however, to see ds106’s very own Hope take the stage for her senior solo! She sang Hozier’s “Take Me to Church,” which is already a profoundly moving video and song. Now, I knew Hope was talented in the fields of graphics, writing, and general worth ethic (she was one of the wonderful members of my radio group!), but when she got up there and started belting out the song with her incredible alto, I was just about moved to tears. Truly, the song became about fifty million times more emotional, and I had shivers. My jaw dropped open, and my friend was equally impressed.
Forget nature and/or sunsets–I had found my beautiful moment in the music and song!
I quickly pulled out my phone and filmed as much of the performance as I could without disturbing the audience members behind me and decided I would pick and choose clips to edit later. I then put away my device to enjoy the rest of the concert.
Once back in my room, I had to watch the footage and choose only one second, and the process was brutal. After exploring some other students’ examples and finding a past blogger that created a short film comprised of various second long clips rather than a single second, I decided to go that route and settled on a particular moment when the group of singers swells into two gorgeous amens–kicked off by an equally gorgeous vocal run from Hope–and spliced the seconds together.
After much obsessive editing (thank goodness I’m already familiar with precision editing in GarageBand and can fairly easily transfer that perfectionism to iMovie) and mad copying and pasting (and lots of replaying the short video–my neighbors can deal. I’m sure they enjoyed hearing the lovely performance over and over again, anyway), I grabbed the beginning of the first amen and the end of the second; therefore, two seconds/two different amens spliced together completes the word and this too-short example of beauty.
If you haven’t already, check out more Bell-A-Cappella awesomeness on Twitter and Facebook, and make sure to come to their next show!
