It’s been a long long time since I did a video essay, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Here I talk briefly about symbolism in O Brother Where Art Thou. Some of the clips I found on Youtube. For others, I used Quicktime to make screen recordings from Netflix. Astute observers may notice that the film is not streaming on Netflix. But when I use my Opera browser, it thinks I’m in Sweden, where Netflix has a somewhat different selection. I used MPEG Streamclip to trim clips and stills from what I had. The voiceover was recorded in Audacity. I put it all together in iMovie. I had to stretch some shots and trim some clips to get the images and video in sync with the voiceover. Not too tedious. I think it came out okay. It’s probably not very insightful and a little slapped together. Adding some background music might have improved it, as well as some titles, but, it’s okay for a quickie.
About raptnrent: I got the name from my keys - R Apt and R Ent for the back door to my apartment and the back door to the house. I liked that they were also words: Rapt, meaning enthralled, riveted, captivated, and Rent, meaning torn asunder, violently wrenched. I thought it made for an interesting juxtaposition, open to all kinds of interpretations.