The Ten-Block Walk

A promotional video for a new opera, in which an old woman crosses the street as time both creeps and flies quickly by.

A new opera  The Ten-Block Walk tells the story of an old woman’s journey from her home to the local senior center. Along the way she confronts fear and other emotions, embodied in the neighborhoods she passes through and the people she meets. Librettist Christie Lee Gibson asked us to create this short piece of video art to capture the mood of the opera.

A single image  Very much like Dancing in the Wind, this short promotional video relies on simple imagery of a single idea and builds a narrative around it with voiceover. We selected material that could support this image from a draft of the opera: a simple piano melody from the introduction and a fusion of dialogue from scenes II and VII.

Scales of time  In the opera, a very short distance (the length of the stage) represents a huge journey to the main character, both literally and metaphorically. We transposed this tension to video with time-lapse and slow-motion photography, contrasting and exaggerating normal scales of time. Some elements in the frame move much faster than real time, and others much slower. Careful control over the camera’s shutter speed allowed us to blur moving objects in one of the time-lapse layers, giving cars and buses a fleeting, ghostly appearance.

Video portrait  Simply asking your subject to look at the camera, as if she were sitting for a painting, creates a compelling intimacy through eye contact. These “video portraits” are a powerful tool for the documentary photographer, and they can be used in the narrative realm as well. Hearing Mrs. Otis’s words while she gazes at us strengthens the idea of inner monologue, and signals that the journey she takes in the opera is as much mental as physical.