This is Morning Haunt No. 1 from Persistence of Vision, the letter I send out every week from the Tennessee back roads. It's free. Get it in your inbox →
This is the notebook. Everything below comes from what I said into the glasses, a few voice memos, and the logs my tools spit out at the end of each day. I've cleaned up the grammar and left the rest.
THURSDAY, OCT 30: THE NOTE ON THE HIGHWAY
I'll start with today, because today is why this newsletter exists.
The morning was supposed to be simple. Bull Run Road, a little graveyard I found earlier in the week, good light. I set the camera to overexpose a little, pulled over, said "this is the spot," and the shutter wouldn't fire. The camera had sat out in the car all night and gotten wet. I swore at it, fiddled with it, and it came back. Then I drove past a yard full of hanging sheet ghosts ("these people are really into it"), turned around for a red barn, said hey to a donkey and a goat, and shot Bull Run in the light I'd been waiting on.
On the highway home I flagged a director's note for whoever ends up editing this, which is mostly me and a stack of tools I'm building. Here it is, close to word for word:
It's kind of emerging that I am investigating with AI ways to create a new form of cinematic zoetrope, experimenting with people's persistence of vision. It's my daily practice: go and shoot, then construct these little pieces about the process, but also these little poetic daily postcards. My daily zoetrope. I'll have to brainstorm what to call it. But it feels great.
Looking back on all the old work I did when it was just unbridled creativity as an early 20-something, it's really reinvigorating me. I'm noticing that my work exists on a much different timescale. It's about the places I revisit over and over again, and the kind of still photographer that is a part of my DNA. What I admired about Ansel was returning to places and waiting on things.
What I wanted it to be when I was 20 could not be, because I had not pursued all of the same things for such a long period of time. In my bio, where it says I'm a time artist, that's really what I am. The filmmaking and whatnot has been completely accidental.
Photography came first for me, at Sheridan in the late '90s. The films, the festivals, 25 years of calling cameras: all of it grew out of that. This week was the first time in a long time I felt the original thing come back.
▶ Watch this clip in the letter on SubstackMONDAY, OCT 27: SIXTEEN WAYS TO SHOW ONE MORNING
School run, then the back roads: Little Marrowbone onto Cotton Branch ("uncharted territory"), Higdon, Cross Creek. I took a lot of pictures of trailers in the trees on a property I nicknamed Breaking Bad Farms. Home to the ducks ("duck-a-roos need some water"), Shania Twain at full volume while filling buckets, a leaf spot on the roses that I asked Claude to diagnose from my phone in the yard.
On the drive I'd been dictating to my glasses the whole time, laying out what I wanted the tools to build. My exact words at the end: "outline it all for me and put it in an email with the associated prompts that I'll need."
By evening the system had built sixteen versions of that one morning. Straight cuts of the farm chores and the photo drive, then the experiments: a zoetrope, a Muybridge sequence, a thaumatrope, a slit-scan, afterimage, accumulate, breath, flicker, scroll, wiggle and a wiggle with optical flow. Most are 18 to 23 seconds long. As zoetropes, they are an abject failure. Here are a few, so you can judge for yourself.
▶ Watch the clips in the letter on SubstackThe machine did what I asked. That's the problem. I described techniques, the names of old optical toys, and I got the techniques back. What I didn't describe is the feeling I'm after: a morning that flickers back to life the way a memory does. That's on me. The next round starts with me digging deeper into how I describe what I want, before I ask it for anything.
The rule I gave the edit, and the one I'm proudest of: footage never cuts away from a photograph. The photo lands as an overlay on top of one unbroken shot from the glasses, and a shutter click plays the moment it appears. You see what I saw, and then you see what I kept.
TUESDAY, OCT 28: BACK ON THE FARM
First farm video in six months. The truck had a little incident, so I lined a rental Jeep with a tarp and spring clamps and did the dump run, then loaded hay into the back seat at the co-op.
Voice memo on the way home, while the glasses made a hyperlapse of the drive: I should plant 15 or 20 fruit trees this fall, mostly peaches. Maybe seedlings, maybe wait for spring and just prepare the sites. If I'm home next summer, I'll need something to do, even if it's just watering trees. Then the black sulfur well came up, and I said the thing I want this whole farm side to live by: "Be nice if everything we did was a little bit humorous. I think character goes a long way."
Director's note of the day, for future me: revisit the Fusion method for realistic motion blur on sped-up footage.
WEDNESDAY, OCT 29: ACTION ACTION ACTION ACTION
Drove to the cemetery I'd found the day before. The light wasn't on it yet, so I left it for tomorrow. That's half of this practice: knowing when to come back.
Chores were a mess in the good way. Chuck got his fancy fly mask. I sang "Love to Burn" to the horses and asked one of them if Uncle Neil's guitar scared him. I discovered the water had been running for four hours, again, which by my count happens about twice a week. I burned cardboard in the fire pit and announced that this is the coolest part of country life. Somewhere in there I left a note for the edit: "in the cut it should be like action action action action."
The system built a long farm piece, a reel, a TikTok, a shooting piece and a Neil Young TikTok built around that song.
Two ideas came out of the day. I want to dig out the stage-by-stage sheets from my years directing Coachella's Sonora stage and Stagecoach's Yuma stage, to see exactly which acts I documented and build reels by year. And I want to start recording myself watching my old films and talking over them. You'll get those here first.
THE PRINTS I'M WRITING ABOUT
Today I also went through 25 My Tennessee photographs and told their stories into a recorder. The Harpeth River vista not far from the house, where we walk the dogs. A house near Dull that I drove past for years before I finally got out of the car. The kudzu barn on Cedar Hill Road, the scenic shortcut I drove every morning on the school run. One frame at Mound Bottom is now titled Drape of Time.
The sentiment of the whole series is in one line I said almost by accident: I'm seeking an understanding of these people who just walked away, and seeing how time has grated new textures into old materials.
These go up in the store soon. November's code: POVNOV (10% off prints at adamckvollick.com, one use per person, good through Nov 30).
TEACHING A MACHINE TO EDIT LIKE ME
I tested a commercial AI editing app against the pipeline I've been building out of open source tools, on the same four days of footage. It analyzed 46 clips in about 8 minutes. My own process takes over an hour for a single day. It's also better at hearing: it caught the singing, the song titles on my phone screen, the names of the feed brands in the duck pen.
But it missed every one of my director's notes, because it has no idea I'm talking to an editor. It got the times wrong on the glasses footage by hours. It never saw a single photograph. And it introduced a miniature horse named "Plato." The name is Play-Doh.
So I'm keeping my own open source spine and borrowing its best idea: listening to the whole clip, sound and all. Next up is something I'm calling the Metapull workflow, as soon as I load today's chores footage. I'll tell you how it goes.
CK
P.S. If you need to remember something on a back road, say it out loud. Today's: roses on the left between Pecan Valley and 12, headed toward Pecan Valley. I'll be back for them.
Persistence of Vision
The letter is free, and it's staying free. I'm doing this for myself regardless. If it means something to you, a tip helps keep it going, and so does a print from the store. Either way, thank you for reading.