This weekend, my family gathered in the North Georgia mountains for a memorial. The rolling hills and creeks of the Southeastern US will always feel like home in many ways, and this trip was no different. The pricks of light through the trees, the swirl of insects, the smell of damp earth – these are deeply embedded sensations. In my family, at least for the last few decades, we do death slowly, and no one gets buried. Whatever kind of peculiar spirituality my family has feels indelibly tied to inland bodies of water. So this time, we gathered on a lake, a place that has seen many family events over the years, and said goodbye to my cousin. Later, my immediate family whispered our own devotions (or tolerated them) near a creek. It was as much a grounding as it was a departing.

This video is a family affair. Everyone was there for its making. The system takes in a short guitar clip (from my sister’s music), and stretches it recursively until the notes all but disappear into each other. The video is a tiny glimpse of a creek, that also stretches, slows, and eventually barely crawls. None of it is recorded in great quality. To further break up the imagery, I also applied an effect called “Scatter” in increasing amounts (doubled every time) to the video. Seemed appropriate. The sound editing was done in Reaper (by my sister) and the video was put together in After Effects. I stopped when AE quit letting me slow down the video (at 9000 percent). The title is a reference to the novel “Trout Fishing in America” which I was mostly unaware of, but my father says should now be “Trout Filming in America” because at a river, we all just get out our phones. No fishing rods in sight.

I’m sure something like this could be done in Max. I tooled around in the interface, but settled on the Adobe standby for this week. I would ideally like to stretch this out to a long drone, that could go on forever. A little like water.

Here are some screenshots from the software:

Reaper:

After Effects: