I’m planning to eventually narrate most of my dragon poems.
That…may take me a bit longer than I expected 😅
I try to keep things simple with these landscape / horizontal poetry videos, to stay aligned with the quiet and mythical tone of them.
I decided not to narrate or post them in chronological order for now. I’ve been jumping around to narrate or work on the ones I feel like trying out first.
I’ve shared the first 3 videos below, with thoughts on why I started on these three.
Video Format Experiments
Not too longer ago, I discovered I kind of enjoy taking short videos and uploading them as YouTube Shorts.
This came about from my mini road trip last autumn.
I shared some pictures in the My Sightings for #MicroYearOfExploration post, and Passamaquoddy (Pete’s Dragon, 1977) last year.
However I still would like to sit down one day and have a more organised, thorough “highlights” blog post of all of the spots I did visit. It’ll be like a blog post version of whatever I’m uploading onto my YouTube as regional nature & hiking videos.
Shooting and editing videos is a completely different process from blogging, so I’m still on the learning curve.
Okay, so on to the actual landscape video choices…
Why I Started with These Three
rain
This was on the shorter side, and I recorded this at night as I thought it fit the mood and relaxing vibe better.
I looked around for a short while on Freesound and found a perfect rain background audio (made by Ryding from Sweden), which went very well with what I had in mind.
Grovebound
This is one of the shorter dragon poems in the collection.
I recorded this at one go with a few other shorter ones.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted ALL of the poems to have a similar looking video thumbnail, as that might look cohesive but a bit boring.
Even with this video, I debated whether to use a “woodland” thumbnail image or a “starry night” image.
I chose to go along with the vibe of the last line in the poem, so that is why the thumbnail and video background is of a starry night 🌌
The Dragon of Toa Payoh
I love this iconic dragon playground in Singapore!
You can check out my sketch of it here, and a visitor sent in a photo in an old post here.
I don’t know why I selected this one to work on as the actual “first” landscape / horizontal dragon poem.
I suppose I liked the poem’s theme of longevity.
I need to start creating the new pages for these dragon poems on this website.
Also, there are a couple of small sets of “seasonal dragon poems” I’d like to put together next, featuring a fellow writing friend who kindly narrated half of the portions.