Over the past year, in the midst of much emotional and financial stress during the pandemic, there was a silver lining in productivity on my personal project. The later part of 2019 and for the first 3 months of 2020, I was on the road working on my project while also visiting a number of wonderful national parks. Since orange had already gone virtual by the start of my trip, my ‘van life’ experience wasn’t exactly just hanging out at all these great national parks! Still, it was an amazing experience as i fondly recall the experience while putting together this montage.
At the start of the trip, I wasn’t planning on doing a lot of video around the journey so the video portion of the piece is a bit sparse but I did incorporate a few of my favorite subjects talking about their Buddhist experience. Although not exactly a highlight trailer for the project, I still had fun stitching together a quasi narrative from the interviews. Originally, I was planning on working with a video editor for my project but with minuscule paid work throughout 2020, I ended up editing all the interviews myself on the project. In hindsight, I am glad I had the time to edit the videos because it’s definitely going to help improve the next phase of my project. For now, enjoy the highlight video or go to the project website to see how ‘Buddhism in the west’ is taking shape!
