Sense of Space
This first project on sound was something that provided me with a bit of a learning curve; I has not before had much focus on sound which accompanied an image, let a lone producing a clip if sound alone. The ideas process started of quite slow in my opinion, trying to come up with an idea which conveyed a sense of space proved to be quite a challenge. My partner then had the idea of trying to achieve a sense of being inside someones head as they attempt to block out the world around them. He described the feeling of being on a train journey, and becoming absorbed in a book; how the more you read into it the more able you are to block out the sounds that are around you. It was pointed out that a sound project attempting to convey emotions and feelings may be quite a challenge, but we believed that it was something we would like to attempt.
Technically, it did provide quite a challenge. Connors role of sound recordist meant trying to collect specific sounds from the station, in order to create an effective atmospheric track on which to base the rest of our project. A lot of the footage collected contained a lot of background sound which we thought would be too distracting for the listener, it took quite a few attempts in order to correct this problem, though we did manage to isolate the audio needed to create an effective atmospheric track. The mono track, including the page-turning and the speech were the most challenging features if our soundtrack; it was vitally important that these were isolated sounds with as little background noise as possible, we booked out a room in the library in order to do this, although we still found that there was some unwanted noise. This would need to be fixed in the editing process.
When it came to editing, which was my designated role, I found it quite difficult to match up the sounds we recorded in order to create a good pace. We also needed to make sure that it was possible for our audience to understand what we were trying to convey. Getting the sound levels correct so that everything was heard and decipherable was probably the biggest challenge in the editing process as all the sounds we had contrasted quite a lot with each other i.e the sound of the train, peoples voices, Connors voice and other general sound effects. After the first group crit, it was much easier knowing that people were able to understand the sort of narrative we were going for, and getting feedback on the sound levels helped us to improve when we went back to edit.
Overall, there are certain aspects of our sound piece which I am pleased with; the atmosphere that it managed to create and I think we really challenged ourselves with trying to portray feelings and thoughts, which I believe we succeeded with to an extent.
Experimental film
Filming this provided me with a bit of a learning curve; it was vitally important to get the camera angle and lighting right when filming the drawing scene, I did a lot of reading into how to do this because I had a specific vision of how this should look. There was also the issue of the burning, this whole procedure had to be moved outside, creating a different background to where the pictures were being drawn. I don't think this is a distinctive mistake though, not something which draws a lot of focus.
Set up the place where you draw comfortable, the light should come from top(preferred) or left side of the drawing if you are right-handed. That way the area you are drawing on is not covered by the shadow of your hand. The arm of the drawing hand should show in the direction of the lightsource to make a shadow only under your arm. Shadows can cause huge brightness flickering in the time lapse.
