Editing Suite 2

Work in process elements from Sommer Of Hate. 
Sommer if Hate is a feminist sci-fi cartoon where political uncertainty plays out its character’s sex lives, commissioned by Channel4 Television as part of Random Acts.

This is an early sketch of video poetry thinking about power, surveillance, and the divine. My eyes are glowing white and I am attempting to eat the camera I've had for three years. The poem text is in the captions. I made this a few months ago during the spring of 2020. 

The three clips I chose to present are clips I chose not to use in the final edit of MHYSA-OneInAMillion.mp4 (2020), the fourth video in my Lavendra/Recovery series. In the Lavendra/Recovery series, I recreate/reinterpret R&B music videos from the 1990s (that I've collected in a digital film archive) using webcams, green screen, cellphone footage and videos and images I find on the internet via YouTube or Google Image search. My alter-ego MHYSA acts as the performer in the videos, as she dances, lip-syncs, sings (often joyfully off-key) in her fangirl homage to the Black Diva Archetype and the stars that defined the genre for my younger self. 

I'm not sure why I didn't use these three clips in the final video recreating Aaliyah's "One In A Million" music video. Maybe the other clips just worked better in the sequence. The video with the flower pot, taken during a Christmas trip to Nigeria, was used a little as a minor addition to a background very briefly in the beginning of the final edit. In the two clips where MHYSA is performing, you see the moments I normally hide-- where a makeshift tripod fails, where I exert control as both performer and director, asking MHYSA/my body to try different gestures, etc. As a Black femme, I feel agency and autonomy while directing myself, editing and conceiving of performance videos; it feels like a restorative act to have so much control over my body given histories of slavery and subjugation. 

The three clips I chose to present are clips I chose not to use in the final edit of MHYSA-OneInAMillion.mp4 (2020), the fourth video in my Lavendra/Recovery series. In the Lavendra/Recovery series, I recreate/reinterpret R&B music videos from the 1990s (that I've collected in a digital film archive) using webcams, green screen, cellphone footage and videos and images I find on the internet via YouTube or Google Image search. My alter-ego MHYSA acts as the performer in the videos, as she dances, lip-syncs, sings (often joyfully off-key) in her fangirl homage to the Black Diva Archetype and the stars that defined the genre for my younger self. 

I'm not sure why I didn't use these three clips in the final video recreating Aaliyah's "One In A Million" music video. Maybe the other clips just worked better in the sequence. The video with the flower pot, taken during a Christmas trip to Nigeria, was used a little as a minor addition to a background very briefly in the beginning of the final edit. In the two clips where MHYSA is performing, you see the moments I normally hide-- where a makeshift tripod fails, where I exert control as both performer and director, asking MHYSA/my body to try different gestures, etc. As a Black femme, I feel agency and autonomy while directing myself, editing and conceiving of performance videos; it feels like a restorative act to have so much control over my body given histories of slavery and subjugation. 

The three clips I chose to present are clips I chose not to use in the final edit of MHYSA-OneInAMillion.mp4 (2020), the fourth video in my Lavendra/Recovery series. In the Lavendra/Recovery series, I recreate/reinterpret R&B music videos from the 1990s (that I've collected in a digital film archive) using webcams, green screen, cellphone footage and videos and images I find on the internet via YouTube or Google Image search. My alter-ego MHYSA acts as the performer in the videos, as she dances, lip-syncs, sings (often joyfully off-key) in her fangirl homage to the Black Diva Archetype and the stars that defined the genre for my younger self. 

I'm not sure why I didn't use these three clips in the final video recreating Aaliyah's "One In A Million" music video. Maybe the other clips just worked better in the sequence. The video with the flower pot, taken during a Christmas trip to Nigeria, was used a little as a minor addition to a background very briefly in the beginning of the final edit. In the two clips where MHYSA is performing, you see the moments I normally hide-- where a makeshift tripod fails, where I exert control as both performer and director, asking MHYSA/my body to try different gestures, etc. As a Black femme, I feel agency and autonomy while directing myself, editing and conceiving of performance videos; it feels like a restorative act to have so much control over my body given histories of slavery and subjugation. 

Work in process elements from Sommer Of Hate. 
Sommer if Hate is a feminist sci-fi cartoon where political uncertainty plays out its character’s sex lives, commissioned by Channel4 Television as part of Random Acts.

Work in process elements from Sommer Of Hate. 
Sommer if Hate is a feminist sci-fi cartoon where political uncertainty plays out its character’s sex lives, commissioned by Channel4 Television as part of Random Acts.