For quite some time now I have been looking at different ways of presenting photos to you. Experimented with things like Instagram and Tik Tok. The latter sending me down the rabbit hole with all the hateful nonsense shit posted on there. There has to be a lot of people smoking a weird shit out there.
I kept looking at my photos and kept thinking who are these people involved in roller derby? While a photo may be worth a thousand words a thousand photos certainly cannot tell you about someone.
Considered video. In addition to not be able to give me what I want there was a greater learning curve involved in producing them. I can do the basics but to do it well it takes some time. I watched Jammer Jeff set up his video and I thought no way. He may be able to organize all that before first whistle but that is not for me. Took me over six years to get rid of all my cables for photographing derby. I was not going to back to blogging cause that is a huge time suck.
Years ago I used to ride a bicycle and while riding I would film other people riding their bicycle and interview a the same time. I ran into an interesting cast of characters. Again I am talking about video but I was not ruling out audio.
Last Wednesday I was looking at how much I had photographed this year, if not three times at least two times more than any other year, and I felt hollow. I loved photographing them and the experiences that came with it. Still, who are those people in my photos? Well I got up and walked down to the Long & McQuaid five minutes from my home and got myself some mics for my audio recorder. I am going to do this!
My first chance to do this was at the Nipissing scrim just outside North Bay. Ok but who to interview first. I walked around awkwardly for a bit to see who I could interview. There were a few familiar faces. I was running out of time. There was a small group of players at the entrance and one was dancing. Ok go for it. Introduced myself and explained what I was doing and I got a yes. She said she had never been interviewed but that was ok. I would be good with five minutes. At 19 minutes I began to worry we would miss the scrim.
If you are looking for something fast this is not it. I have left this almost completely unedited…even a few umms and hmms. For the most part future conversations will remain the same. The only condition I put was no elevator pitches. The conversation can meander to wherever they like. I have more lined up.
Oh and yes this one is contained in a video. Just simply because it was a bit easier with what I know technically speaking but my aim is only audio. That may or may not change. There is some original video at the 19m30s mark for this video.
Apologies. I do my best to keep my personal opinions out of the photos and any comments I may post. A few slipped into this video that should not have but I decided to allow myself to get away with it this time.
Another apology. Some background music caused some copyright issue so I had to cut the music out at the end.