I filmed Kansas.

While most of my fun and not-so-moody videos can be seen here, on my minorheroine Vimeo account, pieces - like the one below - that I spend some time editing or conceiving can be viewed on my grown-up, professional Vimeo here, searchable under Danica Complex.

This is one of those pieces that serendipitously came together from the hodge-podge, thoughtless snippets of video I collected over the course a Christmas visitation to my parents who were on a vicarage in Kansas in 2008.

This first video was the product of listening to the piece Gymnopédie No.1 (featured in the piece). Whether or not I ever heard the music before didn't make it any less nostalgic and it conjured up images from my most recent adventure: a train ride across the country. On thinking on trains I remembered my habit of running out to watch the trains pass behind the school from my job as a clerk in college. One of the cinema professors caught me during one of my escapes and stopped to stare with me at the beast chugging by. Before trotting off he turned to me and said, "Wow... let's make a movie about trains!"

I think I am particularly fond of the "time" theme that accidentally presented itself throughout the film. We see young faces and old hands, old-fashioned words in the cards and new ones being scribbled down - all the while the train moves forward through landscapes, days, and nights.

I meant to create three video pieces to mirror a tradition style of composition that is the sum of three movements usually with a pattern of brisk, ballad, and ending long & lively. I just didn't have enough video to fulfill this pattern, so I satisfied myself with two contrasting paces in the different videos using the same piece of music. In addressing this limitation, other interesting contrasts arose - I found that the first piece which utilized the ballad was more tightly themed, but very loose in structure. This second piece has a distinct narrative that seems to follow the imagination of a protagonist into a whimsical world separated by images of fire. We also see a train again, tying it back to the first film.