Saturday, 31 March 2007

Avanzamos


Some advances, I found a very good deal on 500Gb Lacie drives, so I bought 4 of them. Today I've finished (at last) capturing all the tapes.

Drive 1 - Brazil 2004 - 31 hours
Drive 2 - Peru 2006 - 27 hours
Drives 3 & 4 - Peru 2007 - 76 hours

That's 134 hours of recordings, including interviews with Benny Shanon, Johnatan Ott, Jacques Mabit, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ralph Metzner, Richard Yensen, Antonio Escohotado, Josep Maria Fericgla, dozens of curanderos, mestres and members of the Brazilian Ayahuasca churches: the UDV, A Barquinha, and Daime, psychologists who use the brew to get people off drugs, former drug addicts, and a host of people from all walks of life whose lives have been touched by their encounter ayahuasca, plus rituals, masses, preparations, healing sessions, seminars, detox centers... the list goes on and on.

I am attempting to make an audiovisual archive of all the different manifestations of Ayahuasca use. I am nowhere near done yet and I already have a couple of big problems:

1 What I want to say no longer fits in one, two or even three documentaries

2 If I try to compress the subject skipping over a proper introduction it is very likely that people will not understand/think it's crazy.

..and that is the last thing I want

Working on this problems during a course on Future Documentaries I found a possible solution, using the interactive video tool Korsakow System I could create a multi layered documentary:



On the main (top) level it would be a normal objective 1.5 hour documentary about ayahuasca that even my grandpa could watch.

Throughout the doc there would be a series of video footnotes, that you could access for additional information on a particular point (level 2) after watching the footnote you would be automatically redirected back to the point you left (much like reading a footnote in a book and then continuing reading)

...unless you want more. There would be footnotes to the footnotes these go deeply into the subject (level 3) giving more detailed and technical information.

...and if you want even more there are the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes (level 4) at this level I'd assume the viewer is really interested in the topic. At level 4 wait all the strange, crazy and hard-to-explain things around Ayahuasca. It is also at this level that I say what *I* really think about all this.

At level 1 the doc might be 1.5 hours long, following the footnotes it can stretch up to 6 o 7 hours..

The demo of the system will soon be online, meanwhile you can see some screen captures here.

4 coments:

clancy said...

i couldnt find an email on your page to contact you directly. i have some artwork on my site regarding ayahuasca and santo daime, if you would like to see
http://www.clancycavnar.com

Anonymous said...

hi,

also looking for your email :) realised that we are going to the same event:
http://www.soga-del-alma.org/ConferenceSite/guests_jeronimo.html

it links to your old blog, btw, - and, really, you should come over to Wordpress or some other non-Google world, if you are concerned about information freedom, hehe - in other words, i agree to what you are saying about the current convergence of IP law and philosophy in cyberspace and with regards to indigenous peoples' knowledge and practices

whether Creative Commons is the right place for such a convergence is an altogether different question - to which I think I have to answer: "NO, it is not!" - time and time again we have seen manifested that CC is essentially an elitist organisation, establishment missionaries, liberal colonists.

For instance:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality/

But thanks a lot for the link - have been looking for the document (read about it here: http://onthecommons.org/node/1022/print

Anonymous said...

bugger, the links are dead, so here goes, hopefully:

Ayahuasca and Shamanism Conference

CC critique link

But thanks a lot for the CC & Indig. Ppls link - have been looking for the document :
(read about it here

Anonymous said...

btw, see also:

the bio for an interesting Tena, Ecuador based ayahuasquero called Fidel

chau,
from colonos