During 2020 Homegrown Stories will collaborate with artists interested in visually exploring issues affecting the environment.

During 2018-2019 Homegrown Stories collaborated with a group of videomakers on a 360 online experiment.  Using the prompt ‘trails’, artists were asked to create short observational videos, inspired by the prompt and making use of 360 technology.

The results harken back to the earliest forms of moving pictures- the one shot, the travelogue, the diorama.

Click on the link to see what resulted:   The Trails Project

2017 was the year of Elemental, where we collaborated with sound artists to create spatial explorations.  The final project for the year was a 360 video journey down the LA River.  Because of the challenges of the post workflow, this video was a long time coming but is now finished.

If you have an Oculus or Vive headset, the experience is very immersive. Enjoy the tour!

The LA River Project, a collaboration with Hamboning Media and sound artist Rosie Tucker.

“There’s a place I always go… the tangled, messy border where human and nature collide and collude. Edgeland.” – NYTimes writer Rob Cowen

This idea of Edgelands – that space between city and country, wild and tamed, was the inspiration for this fifth edition of the Elemental series.  For this topic we asked Catherine Pancake, a US-based sound designer and composer, to create an original soundscape based on the idea of Edgelands.  Using Catherine’s piece as the starting point, we each created a video interpretation to accompany the sound- one more narrative, the other more experimental- yet both walking that imaginary line.

On August 21, 2017 a momentous astronomical event took place in the US, a total eclipse of the sun. The year of Elemental marked this event by asking French sound designer Patrick de Caumette to create an original sound composition.  With eclipse footage supplied by Derek Muller and John D. Boswell, Sandy and LeAnn took wide inspiration from the word and phenomenon of eclipse.

sound composer: Patrick de Caumette

editor: LeAnn Erickson with Sandra Louise Dyas

videographers: Sandra Louise Dyas, LeAnn Erickson, Derek Muller with John D. Boswell

Derek Muller is Veritasium

John D. Boswell is Symphony of Science

As the year of Elemental continues, our third sound artist, Ng Chor Guan, chose the prompt Sense as his inspiration. Perception is defined as the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.  Using the prompt and Guan’s haunting soundtrack, we each created separate videos, yet both pieces share a number of visual themes.

The Theremin is an early and unusual electronic instrument where the performer plays the device without ever touching it. Malaysian composer Ng Chor Guan, a master of the theremin, chose ‘sense’ as his prompt to create this haunting soundtrack. Inspired by the feeling of mystery and loss, I created a piece based on an isolated artist residency I completed at the National Seashore of Cape Cod.