Shot on iPhone 3GS.

It was because I shot this on my phone that I felt free to edit like a teenager again. With the DSLR it's possible, expected even, that you get a crisp and beautiful shot. When the resolution of your footage is 640 x 480 that ain't going to happen. Low-res and square, an amateur-looking vid is inevitable.

So I embraced that. I edited quick and dirty. I chose brutal pragmatism over elegance. For example, the single shot of Whitehall ending with a glimpse of Nelson's Column was too long in real time to fit in. But the merit of the one-take shot was it captured the variety of people on the ride, and also shows the unique way Critical Mass allows you to see the city. So the question was: How do I keep those messages without hacking the clip into an anonymous montage? The most simple solution was to selectively speed up the footage. Not slick but definitely effective.

The amateur ethos continued as I kept in poor framing, camera wobbles, low lighting, grainy and noisy images. And while I was at it, I chose to chop it up to a shamelessly joyless track with what would now become pedantic lyrics. It was liberating. By the end I decided to go for broke and edit every clip with different colour correction to complete the rough and ready nature of it.

The affordability of broadcast quality cameras that can create beautiful images have seen most people aspire to and value highly, professional looking aesthetics. Usually I'm with that crowd, and I'll be back with them tomorrow, but it was good to regress to the skill-less enthusiast who cares more about the energy and sentiment than the slickness.

Ps. Serendipity: http://www.truphtooph.co.uk/2012/05/28/i-do-not-know-well-what-it-originated-this-tension/