(click here if you can’t see embedded video)
(Check out more of Lydia’s music at soundcloud.com/lydia-ang)
One camera, one lens, one week in Laos – that was the plan.
Laos was the only country in Southeast Asia I had yet to visit, so I decided on a week-long trip carrying only a haversack with the bare essentials. Camera-wise, this meant my only my GH3 & CCTV lens…low profile & fun to shoot!
No googling, no planning, no lens mount – those were the rules.
It’s more fun & less stressful to go to a country you know nothing about, and to then find out about it through fresh eyes & ears & making new friends. I even graded the colour in-camera so all I had to do at the end of each day was upload the pictures straight from my camera through my phone to Facebook.
Collaboration, with fresh eyes & ears – this is the result.
In total I had only 1 hour of footage captured by the end of the trip, as I had chosen to take mostly stills (in fact, the video was an afterthought…if I’d concentrated only on video, there would be much more variety). I put aside the footage with the intention of one day cutting it, and a certain song kept popping into my head whenever I thought about it. Finally, I got down to cutting the footage to that song, which visually is what you see in the video. But I wanted music that fit the visuals, not the other way round, so I sent the cut to Lydia (my long-time composer) to score it with fresh eyes & ears, as though seeing & listening to the sound for the first time. It was her idea to incorporate the sound into the music, and we both worked together on the sound design in tandem with her music.
What I’m left with is the memories I have of Laos, seeing & hearing it for the first time as you do now.