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PostSecret
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This beautifully crafted montage by Pittsburgh-based 10-person creative agency Carney-Fireman captures the emotional power and poignancy of PostSecret, Frank Warren's mail-in art community project and weblog, which collects the secrets of strangers on postcards. Produced for publisher William Morrow to promote the PostSecret books, the video was posted on YouTube two weeks ago and has already received over half a million hits.
While showing the secrets on the web offers "immediacy," in book form "a narrative" and in art exhibitions "tangibility," Warren explains, "the nice thing about the video was to show the cards in another, more animated way, tapping into the story behind the secret in a more emotional and visceral way. And it was a new way to allow the secrets to touch people."
Fireman, who has done video trailers before for other authors (Joe Hill's "The Heart-Shaped Box," Andrew Gross' "The Blue Zone"), said when approached to do the project they paid very close attention to PostSecret's contributors and its hundreds of fans and fan videos. "We had to be true to the cards and true to the art and we had to be very literal to the language of the cards," he says.
"The challenge of representing the written word on the web in a compressed video box eliminated some cards, because graphically they'd be too difficult to decipher on the web," he explains.
Both Warren and Fireman also wanted a wide cross-section of secrets. "So that it wasn't just sexual secrets or funny secrets, but touches on all human emotions: the joyful, the confused, the anguished," says Warren. "That's when the project is at its most powerful; it's a full-bodied opera, and you can go from something funny to tragic in a microsecond. It adds something more to have the sum of these secrets."
For the video production which took about three months to complete, Fireman's crew, upon the recommendation of Warren, cut the images to Sia's "Breathe Me" -- and added a human aspect to the material by videotaping people approaching mail boxes and giving the footage an old nostalgic home-movie effect, "because most of the cards are handmade," Fireman says. He also highlights the image and cutting by Jim DiSpirito, former percussionist for the multi-platinum-band Rusted Root, who has a wonderfully rhythmic touch to the edits.
Warren admits he had tried video clips before, but was never satisfied with them. But he's finally warming up to the format. "It's really exciting to work in the field of blogs and internet videos," he says. "What we're seeing on the Internet now is not tapping into the vastness of the potential of the web," he adds. "I hope that people can appreciate the Internet for sincere, soulful purposes, too."
-Anthony Kaufman
Carney-Fireman
Drama, Music Video, Experimental
4:53
$5,000
Narrator : Frank Warren
Frank Warren, Bridget Lasch, Mike Galone
Paul Fireman
Paul Fireman, Carol Lee Espy, Frank Warren, Jim DiSpirito
Jim DiSpirito
Jim DiSpirito
Art Direction : Mike Galone
Music : Sia
Project Manager : Sara Boehm
Artwork : Hundreds of PostSecret contributors
