Coffee Doc
I made a little "music video" trying to capture the story of coffee. Initially it all started out as an effort trying to capture the story of homelessness in Seattle because I wanted to try finding an interesting use of all the photos I've had a chance to take of homeless people (although many of the photos in this video came from google images, yeah I guess I cheated). If you've ever tried to photograph homeless persons, and homelessness in general, it's not easy. To get the a good shot you have to appear invisible and non-threatening as possible. After all, they're human, not zoo animals, and how would feel if some random stranger came up to you in the middle of you handling your business with a camera flashing your eyes out? Plus, homeless persons are more alert than you think. People might look like they're sleeping on a bench and don't see you but they see you man. They just seem to have an acute sense when someone or something is eyeing them. I tried to take pictures of homelessness in Buffalo when I was writing my thesis, and it wasn't easy trying to gets shots of people in thier normal element. It was like once they saw me taking a picture they had all kinds of questions: who was I, was I a cop, why was I by myself, did I have any money, etc. Needless to say, I didn't get very many pictures and the ones I did were not useful for a thesis presentation.
So anyway, once I started collecting the pics I needed, I noticed a couple common themes among a lot of the images: empty hands and empty coffee cups. Which then made me think of Seattle and its coffee-worship culture. I don't think I've ever been to any other city where "cuppings" (a fancy term for coffee-tastings) are a weekday regular activity, where indie-hipster coffee shops outnumber public libraries, and where I don't know of any other state or major city that has bikini baristas! Only in and around Seattle would the concept of drive-thru-bikini-clad-barista ever be invented. So I decided to try to lace together a story about coffee. Coffee is an interesting and laborious trade. It costs more to process coffee into a state that can be consumed, than it does to process sugar cane into rum - and both are pretty complex crops. I digress. When I finished rendering this little music video I thought the viewer might interpret the whole thing as an anti-Starbucks crusade. The idea behind all this is not meant to be "anti-Starbucks." Rather the idea was to try to show where coffee comes from and where it ends up, physically and socio-economically.
And because I am still tossed up on the video editing, a couple editing notes & disclaimer. I would prefer and love to use Final Cut Pro to do this kinda of stuff, but that's gonna be on the wishlist for a long time, so Windows Movie Maker will have to do in the meantime. The soundtrack is called "Wake Up" by Arcade Fire, and I chose that song for no other reason other than it was just the right length for number of images I had strung together, and until I figure out how to and get better at editing down audio files, I'm just digging stuff outta my iTunes. So yeah. Coffee dude.
posted by Westcoaster @ 1:31 AM
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