Ben Crowder / Blog

Blog: #videos

Sacred Shapes walkthrough

Long ago before the pandemic, I took some footage of a short walkthrough of my Sacred Shapes exhibit, for those who couldn’t go see it in person. Finally got around to editing it (adding titles and music, nothing major):

I don’t use Premiere very often, so it took a little while to rediscover how to expand the audio track for keyframing levels, and I wish it supported different leading values in multiline textboxes, but overall the editing didn’t take very long and went smoothly enough. Makes me want to make more videos. (Bad idea right now, when school’s about to start.)


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The coffinmaker and the metalsmith

Nice three-minute documentary about a guy who makes wooden coffins:

And another one about a metalsmith facing blindness:


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Seb Lester calligraphy

Some beautiful calligraphy work by Seb Lester:


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Gorgeous fountain pen demonstration

This is so, so beautiful:

My goodness. And now of course I’m aching to learn calligraphy.


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Using our hands as hands

I loved this series of two short documentaries showing how a John Neeman axe and then chisel is made:

The video description also has a great quote from Gandhi:

It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery methods continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God.

Now I want to go carve axe handles. And apprentice with a blacksmith.


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