My Video Tribute: Heartwood, Paired With the Photography That Inspired It

[Will 2,215]

Only the past couple months I've been working on this, on and off.

 

This video is John Williams' concert work "Heartwood" paired with William Guion's beautiful southern oak tree photographs. As some of you may know, it was one of Guion's books, Heartwood, that inspired Williams' piece. The book included his black and white oak tree photographs alongside almost meditative poetry by Rumi on profound subjects such as the heart, love, life, consciousness, and spirituality. Some, although not all, of the photos in the video are from that book. I found the photos at http://www.williamguion.com/. 

 

I was often painstaking in my choices of photos, making sure they fit the mood of the music, or at least my interpretation of it, as well as reflected what I believe to be the overall meaning of Williams' piece and the photos. 

 

Putting this together was a fascinating and emotional experience. I hope some of you find watching it at least half as fulfilling. 

 

While you can stream the video, I strongly recommend downloading it, as the quality improves significantly. You can always delete it after watching if you're worried about the space it takes up (316.82 MB). 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n7seqver5nylqiu/Heartwood.mp4?dl=0

 

@TheGreyPilgrim and @Cerebral Cortex, you may find this interesting. 

[Cerebral Cortex 3,357]

Fantastic work, bud! The visuals and audio work beautifully together, and certainly makes me appreciate the work even more than I did prior to watching. It's great being able to more directly ascertain the inspiration Williams was drawing from while writing the piece. This was well worth the wait. 

[artguy360 1,843]

Nice! great work. What was your motivation for making this?

[Will 2,215]

14 hours ago, artguy360 said:

Nice! great work. What was your motivation for making this?

 

Just randomly realized when I really started to get into this piece a few months ago that it was fairly (entirely?) unique among Williams concert works in having a specific program of sorts (or at least a specific inspiration), not just some general ambiguous concept. 

 

And I thought it would be really cool to explore that influence. 

[Miguel Andrade 1,263]

I've had that rather small book for a decade now. While deeply interesting, a fine work of art (the book), which I can understand how it can be inspirational, I rather listen to the music sans images.

[Thor 7,504]

Same here. For all the tree-inspired pieces JW has written, I rather freely associate about things that have nothing to do with trees. But fine work, Will!