It's 8,000 feet more or less uphill and a thousand miles west and north from El Cielo Studio to the real thing -- heaven on earth has to be the mountains of central Colorado, where my sister Rosamonde lives and works. We took a girl's road trip - Linda, cousin Alana, sister-in-law Toogie and me -- stopping at Tucumcari each way, spending 4 skylit days in and around the mountain valley town of Salida.
The trip gave me the opportunity to play around with my new Flip camcorder, a tiny video digital movie camera that fits in a pocket, plugs into the side of your computer, and is easy to use with my iMovie software, also, until this last week an untried bit of techno-wizardry.
After playing around with the camera and learning the rudiments of editing with iMovie, I am embracing my "inner filmmaker." What a kick! Flip is just little enough and simple enough to be nonthreatening; complex and good enough sound and image enough to hook me, and the software is fun and intuitive. Six hours passed like six minutes (then I crashed the computer and realized that I hadn't saved anything). Oh well. Second time around and I still have some tweaks to make to "The Hike," a project of absolutely no value or interest except to the participants. BUT, I can't wait to use this camera and editing software to do some mini-movies about the next El Cielo Workshop. Then I guess I'll have to learn to post to uTube and link to the movie from this blog. Technology never stops demanding my attention. And trying to keep the reality going in the studio has been a challenge. More about that tomorrow.
