Some weeks ago I had an idea for a series of posts that led me to taking more video (with Dee´s video camera). The idea hasn´t worked but I ended up with a lot of video clips as a consequence.

At the start I was trying to capture some specifics, and I would talk as I was recording. I quickly decided that it was crap, that I was crap and that the idea wasn’t working, but being a sea lover I realised I liked filming the coast, so I started just recording the sea for a brief period every day that I was there, for a few weeks.

I could have filmed the sea itself but without reference points and with an ordinary (non-HD) camera I was limited also. I needed context, so the sea becomes the sea plus the coast, the picture needs the frame.

I hope you enjoy it, I’m very happy with it. I decided against a shorter movie of just a few minutes long, with lots of quick cuts through different clips. Modern media teaches us to be impatient, but the sea is about waiting.

I wanted longer segments just watching the waves and absorbing the movements so the result is 18 minutes long. I’m no film-maker but I enjoyed making this, which is all that counts. If some of you enjoy it, that is the icing on the cake. I have a question though. Can you sit and watch the sea for 18 minutes? And if you can’t, does that mean something? You decide.  We are taught that we have a place and that there are things we can’t do. I reject that imposition. We are all whatever we want to be. We just need to free ourselves. Sometimes we need to free ourselves to do nothing.

So that is what I started filming. Waves breaking on rocks and reefs and cliffs and promenades. Calm water. Birds. Big surge and small breakers. High, middle and low tide. Even occasional people who entered the frame or whose voices are captured, surfers, fishermen, teenagers and even a couple of swimmers. Wind and wave sounds. Clouds and sun.

We imagine the sea as much as we view it. Without a context the sea is the Abyss, we can´t really stare at it for a long time, we are too small to be able to let ourselves flow into it or let it flow into us. People call it boredom, but it’s not, it’s a clash of scale. And we wish to anthropomorphize the sea, to abrogate its alienness and yet we never can, the best we can do is call it home.

So here instead is a representation of the sea, in a way we can handle it, a series of clips of the Copper Coast, days of sea.

There’s a high-resolution version, I suggest you choose it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Creative Commons Licensed, despite Google forcing a YouTube license on it, so you can do what you want with it (edits, cut, change, once you only acknowledge the source).

If you wish to download the 700mb original file to watch it on a TV or offline, here’s a Rapidshare link. I’ll add a Vimeo link later also.