Exile: its meaning, purpose & tips

I know, it’s an odd topic but hear me out…

Why though?

It’s so simple.

I went to the beach, I found a nice spot to set down camp, and once I had a swim and settled in, I got a feeling of being alone and far, far away.

To capture the feeling and to practice taking wide video and being “on camera” I recorded the scene on my phone. I thought, maybe I could even use the video clips at one point.

With the beach footage in mind, and the feeling it gave, I researched the idea of exile. It’s a subject that’s come up in my own fiction and poetry writing. It’s an interesting subject. The more I found out, the more a video came together.

So this is how I used the beach footage:

Notes on the video

I used:

• smartphone for beach footage, no tripod or mic

• my “Blue Wave” 10x10” mini acrylic painting in lieu of the beach’s water view

• ChatGPT, Answer the Public, YouTube and Google search to shape and research the ideas of the video

• Canva to make the longer, wide version of the video itself as well as shorter vertical versions for social media, the thumbnail, and graphics

• Audio from YouTube’s free audio library, including surf sounds and thought-provoking background music

What I like and what I don’t like

I like that the video felt fresh to me in the sense of experiencing something and within a week putting it into a video and dispatching it out to the world. If people knew more about exile, maybe it would be easier to survive and thrive through it.

I don’t like that the video reveals the kind of subjects that I’m liable to go off on a riff about. I mean, who thinks about exile??

~ Your pal, Nan.