Artist’s Statement:
Constant was a really interesting project from my point of view. It is a gentle love poem by a well known Cork Poet called Anton Floyd, using The Voyager Space Mission and its journey into the great unknown juxtaposed against the constancy of the love he holds for his wife. Anton was a beginner at filmmaking. He downloaded Carl Sagans famous Blue Dot Video from the internet and used it as a backdrop to his recited poem. He asked me to polish it up for him. He went to a sound studio to rerecord the voice as recommended by me and then tried to chase down Carl Sagans estate to get permission to use the video. Unfortunately, after much searching for an answer, they refused him.That threw it firmly in my lap. I began to search free footage websites for creations that I could use to simulate the impact of the desired visual. I found a few videos on Pexels.com that I was able to overlay and manipulate using my editing suite of choice, Final Cut Pro. Then Freesound.com and some actual recordings from space provided the sound track. I think in the end we managed to use Creative Commons material to simulate the effect that the Blue Dot video would had made. A lesson certainly to me in what can be an achieved with very little. Maybe next time I will ask AI to help me. All sources attributed at end of film.
