Presenting Ideas

Having presented my initial idea to the rest of the group, and am encouraged to stay on the subject of secrets and confessions, relating in particular to the relationships we have with others. However, though I originally planned to use Tracey Emin's work as quite a literal and direct inspiration, I have now decided to use the inspiration I have found in this piece of work, and take it in my own direction.  As mentioned before, I will be exploring the idea of secrets/confessions, and how they have an impact on both ourselves and those around us who we care about. After some consideration and further planning, I have decided to keep the piece pretty simple; it focuses on the kind of secrets that we keep from those we love, and why we have them despite how much they will effect our relationships. For example; infidelity, drug use, financial worries, sexuality, teenage pregnancy ect. and how they can worsen the situation the longer they are kept to ourselves.

Task #2 Experimental Film

On the first introduction to this task, my initial idea was to go along with exactly what the brief said; pick a word/object and work from there as a starting point. My first thoughts were to pick a part/s of the human body, and explore these and their connotations for the duration of the film. I thought of focusing on skin, lips, hair, eyes, and then even more specific; the creases and folds of the skin, birth marks, freckles, wrinkles. I imagine all of these would provided a starting point with plenty of potential to develop. My mind then started to look at this backwards; thinking of different emotions, thoughts and feelings to convey, before pinpointing a specific word or object. For example, from what I gather, experimental film can be heavily influenced by art; either one's own or the work of others. One artist I have always found completely bizarre, yet incredibly interesting and meaningful, was that of British artist Tracey Emin. Often described as a 'consummate storyteller' Emin's work engages the viewer with her candid exploration of universal emotions. Well-known for her confessional art, Tracey Emin uses personal details from her life in order to engage the viewer with her expressions of universal emotions. 

This concept of 'confessional art' is something that is providing a real pinpoint for me in beginning this project; taking something personal and making it impersonal by showing and sharing to the world, through an exploration of our shared understanding of universal emotions. A particular piece of Emin's work, "Everyone I have ever slept with" is one which my mind has focused on. Often mistaken as "Everyone I've ever had sex with", this piece presents to us all of the intimate relationships that Emin had had up until the point it was made. I see it as a very raw and personal piece; the names appliquéd on the inside of the tent are those of family members, children, friends and lovers. It implies to us the different types of relationships, and the intense feelings which can be tied to those relationships, whether it be love, lust, sorrow, anger or pain.

This piece of art, along with many other of Emin's work, has inspired me to explore the concept of 'confessional art'. This could either be literally tied to "The tent" as I have many ideas which could relate to the piece at this point, or it could be a starting point to develop into a whole new concept. 

Sense Of Space Audio- Reading on the Train

Editing

The editing process of this piece did not come without it's setbacks; being the designated sound editor of this project, it was my job to find my way around the Pro Tools software in order to edit our piece together. Having never used any type of specific editing software, I found this to be quite difficult, especially seeing as my past experiences have had little to do with the technical aspects of film-making, so I saw this as a huge learning curve for myself.
Despite being overwhelmed by all the different options and controls, the layout of the software seemed pretty straightforward and importing the audio files proved to be easy enough. The difficulties came when navigating the software, and learning about how to do each different edit that I wanted to apply to our piece. The main thing I needed to put across in our piece, was that the atmospheric and ambient sounds (the platform, train, people ect.) were supposed to fade out and the dialogue (the person reading the text) was to slowly become louder and more distinguishable. This meant learning how to use the volume levels in such a way as to put across this concept; between myself and my partner, we have so far managed to get the hang of playing with the volume levels in order to achieve the desired sound, now that we have done this, the piece is beginning to come together.

Now that we have both of these important ambient tracks down, it was then a matter of layering all of the other tracks that we had to accompany the reading of the text; Connor had recorded various sounds that relate to the passage he is reading e.g the sound of bacon cooking, the clinking of cutlery, and other general noises. I had to incorporate these into the audio in a way so that the listener would know which part of the piece that they were supposed to relate to. So, we had these gradually fade in a long with the speech; the sounds are supposed to add a sense of space to the listener in regards to what is being read from the page.
With my limited understanding of the software, I didn't want to over-complicate the piece with various different and complicated edits. I don't think it was necessary anyway, as the piece if more about getting the timings of the sounds right, rather than manipulating what is being heard. I think the edit we have so far still needs some work, but we are well on our way with what we are trying to achieve.

Group Crit 1

The rough work we had to present in our informal crit was very minimal, we had our most basic sounds and our initial idea. This, along with some technical problems, meant that we had a very little to present at this point. The feedback we received was that our idea and concept was a little vague and hard to understand; not a lot of people understood exactly what we were trying to achieve. We needed to identify the flaws in our idea in order to make it clearer to our audience. Our piece at the moment was only a few raw sound files, unedited and out of order, despite this, it was still important that there was some basic idea of our intentions. We had to completely re-think how we were going to be putting across our piece to make sure that what we wanted to put across was achieved. 

Suggested improvements

A few changes were suggested in order to make our piece a lot more identifiable in terms of what we were trying to achieve. It was first suggested that rather than have a verbal description throughout our piece, describing the thoughts and feelings of the subject, that we have him reading an extract from a book to help illustrate the feeling of drowning out the outside world. This would give our piece more direction, which I think was definitely required given the fact that a lot of people didn't quite understand the concept of our piece. Another suggestion given in order to improve our piece, was to incorporate and layer additional sounds which relate to the piece if text which is being read. This would further enhance the effect of drowning out the outside world and becoming engrossed in the story so much that the sounds you can imagine, are drowning out what is around you.

From this point, we plan to re-approach our project with these things in mind. Hopefully they will give our piece extra depth and understanding.