Day 33 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A video walk

Today I went on a video walk with the DJI OSMO pocket three or whichever number it has and I took a series of frames. Before going for my daily walk I searched through the Vision Du Réel virtual Film Festival list of films and I found "The Bridge". It's available for all to watch during the festival. I didn't watch it in full but from what I saw it's a series of shots in the style of Dziga Vertov's Man With the Movie Camera.

This inspired me to get out and go for a walk and try an experiment of my own. It's nine minutes of footage of a village during lockdown in Switzerland. You can hear birds cheeping, banging of some kind or other, people playing in the distance and more. You can also see the occasional car, pedestrian or cyclist. If ever you wanted to go and get B-roll for a post-apocalyptic film it would be now.

A few minutes of footage for a small village in Switzerland during self-isolation.

The footage was quickly edited using DaVinci resolve and I simply removed the chrominance. It would take seconds to prepare the version with normal colours. This is as an hommage to the vision Du Réel documentary.

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@visionsdureel mon verre est la. ;-). Prêt pour le festival de cette année.

A post shared by Richard Azia (@richardazia) on Apr 17, 2020 at 7:55am PDT

I know of a group that does improv through an event I participated in two or three years ago and I follow them on Facebook. A few days ago they said that they had to cancel an upcoming event because of COVID-19 and related restrictions and when I saw this I suggested that they should stream the event with something like Zoom.

Renegade Saints Improv Zoomathon

At least fifty people were watching the stream so it had more people than you'd find at one of the free sessions. I want to see more of this, and for the next one I want people to move around in space more. Just because you're video conferencing doesn't mean that you need to sit at a desk. I did see that some people were moving around within a room. My idea is to take it outdoors and make it immersive.

Some people take phone calls outdoors. During two or three walks I whatsapped or video chatted while walking around between fields. For people who are stuck in towns with no right to go for walks this is a nice way of seeing the countryside. For others, who are living alone this is a way of going for a walk with someone else at a time when we can't. It's fun to have this level of flexibility with modern technology.

The Distance Covered

Although I'm walking in a spyrograph of circles around my home I am covering considerable distances during this pandemic. Within 40 days of walking I would have completed the Via Alpina Swiss track one. The distance is 390 kilometres and I was walking ten kilometres a day. In peak hiking conditions I would do that thru-hike in 20 days, with two or three rest days for luck. Maybe that's what I should do when we can move around again.

See you tomorrow.