‘1000 Rubies’ is based on a music and poetry piece by Adrian Carter (Sheffield, UK), for which I provided spoken and sung vocals. The music was first released in 2008, on an EP of the same name, still available at the Internet Archive. This track has had a special place in my heart over these years and, revisiting it recently, I found myself beginning to make this video with it. In its final form, the piece is a hybrid of music video and poetry film. The images are from Unsplash, a website for highly creative photography from around the world, all made available for re-use on public domain licence. I selected and juxtaposed the images for their associative resonances with the words, and arranged them in an order to tell a kind of abstract, gestural narrative. I built up a visual motif in this video around the colour red, relating to the rubies of the title. In editing I added movement to the stills through zooms, reversal of framing, and jump cuts on the beats, like heart beats with the music. The one moving image sequence is from royalty-free site, Videoblocks. This was quite a time intensive project to make, mainly because I worked with each of the large number of stills individually. The video forms part of a group with my own sung and/or spoken voice on the soundtrack, including One Dream Opening Into Many, Poem for Rent, 7 March and I Drove to the River.
Marie Craven is an Australian film-maker who has directed, written and/or produced short films since 1984. Based in Queensland since 2002, she spent her early childhood living on a sheep and cattle station in country NSW, before her family relocated to Melbourne in 1967.
