avid.001

After the long break away from AVID, I felt rather unfamiliar with the software. Surprisingly, as soon as we all got our workspaces and passwords, it all started coming back naturally. 

On the very first day, I looked through the 'Meat Bag' footage, sorted it into bins, made a basic rough cut and left it at that. I felt very conflicted about the footage as there were large jumps in the flow of the story and it made me feel anxious when viewing it. I thought, if I have to edit together a film and I'm already feeling stressed just reviewing the rough cut, I won't be able to make it to my usual standard, or enjoy the process. 

I left it at that and the following week, after a chat with Kathryn, I decided to import the footage from 'Basement' (which I re-titled Rouge) and start from scratch. Perhaps due to the fact I hadn't seen this footage before, I felt excited and intrigued, and within one day I had made a rough cut, a second rough cut and a diegetic soundtrack. 

Following that, I saw that the weather forecast was suggesting there might be snow, so I went decided to spend my free Thursday afternoon editing until the closing time at 8pm. By this time, I had a cut I was pleased with, audio was 90% synced and I was able to do some colour retouching. 

As predicted, campus was shut on Friday due to snowfall.

The week after that, I made use of the AVID rooms after 4pm which was when the MAs left.

I added a crop because I felt it gave a more TV-like feeling, and I thought it would be interesting to add sound to the TV. I used that of an old, short trailer and it matched perfectly with the feel I was going for. During the edit, I decided I wanted it to imply that the lives of the characters were also almost TV-like. I also got some ambient and atmospheric soundtracks, to increase the feeling of suspense and oddness, with some strange noises increasing when the Boyfriend enters the basement. 

Most of my time was spent keyframing audio and retouching the highlights (as in some shots the settings looked completely different!) so that on its own took about a day and a half. Other than that, I found it very easy to keep everything tidy within each Bin, all the AVID tools felt easy and understandable to use by the end of the editing process, and I handed in my final edit on February 7th.

Here's what that almost Final Cut looked like, with all the keyframes, titles, audio, cuts and the coloured overlay at the end to make it look like a light-leak (although the implied message was it starts again!)

today i will write a poem for us.

 My main focuses for sounds were: 

• wind (such as whistling, blowing into an empty bottle,

blowing into my palm, breathing)

• train (metal against glass for the train track vibration,

dropping announcement, train woosh)

• birds (a mix of both seaguls and chickens)

(because Jack lives in Norfolk and everyone has to have chickens there)

• paper (opening a notebook, running fingers over a piece of paper,

scrunching up paper, throwing paper into the air, paper falling)

• writing (opening and closing a pen, writing in different paces)

I also had to improvise because I didn't have a dead cat

or any other microphone cover..

After that, I created a timeline for all that was happening within the piece.

Birds in the sky. Light wind. Train station.
People kicking stones in front of the station.

Metallic sound/vibration of the train tracks where a train is approaching.

The train goes past. There is a person standing at the station.

Announcement rings through the small station, wind flows through the gaps.
The person opens the little folder in their hands and pops off the pen lid with their mouth.
They scribble something whilst looking up at the view instead of the paper.
They look down and tear the paper into two, scrunching it up and throwing it away.
They write something again, this time paying attention. As they write, the wind picks up.
It whistles and gets noisy. The paper flies up and is taken away by the gust.

I ended up with eleven tracks overall. Right before the export I came across a problem in the playback after unplugging my headphones. Detected dropped samples. There would be a very short jump in the audio but when exported, it would disappear. I tried to find the solution within Audition but couldn't, so that's something I have to look into because it really confused me.

This is the final outcome.

the journey to mount fuji.

The beginning: Hokusai

Hokusai developed late as an artist and started the series at the age of 70, drawing, printing and cutting wood blocks for publishers and other artists prior to that. At the age of seventy-five he said about himself: “I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred I shall certainly have reached a magnificent level; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything-every dot, every dash — will live.”

Thirty-six View of Mount Fuji strikes the viewer with its diversity of compositions and scenes that seem never to repeat each other. The series includes close-up views of the sacred mountain where it appears alone in its majesty depicted throughout the seasons and weather conditions; as well as distant (and very distant) views where it rather serves as a constant for every-day life scenes.

The middle: Wall

After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 1999-2000 

Wall describes his work as “cinematographic” re-creations of everyday moments he has witnessed, but did not photograph at the time. “To not photograph,” he says, “gives a certain freedom to then re-create or reshape what I saw.” [..] In his new show, you will search in vain for anything as spectacularly hyperreal as A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)1993, a huge digital collage in which four figures in a landscape respond to a sudden squall that bends trees and scatters a sheaf of papers though the air. Today, most of his images resemble reportage and, as such, are likely to incense his detractors, who claim he’s not a “true” photographer.

The approach: The World Spins, The Convenience Store, Welcome to Night Vale, Paterson

I find it hard to visualise a soundscape without a story holding it up, hence why my main goal straight after choosing an image was to come up with a visual journey that I could then imagine within sound. Thankfully I came across a film called Paterson by Jim Jarmusch that really helped me find a solid starting point. This film is about a bus driver in a town called Paterson (his name is also Paterson) who has a passion for poetry. This film is lovely because it isn't based around dialogues and instead focuses on either listening to the speech of others, or talking to oneself. 

Anyhow, I found the journey of the film to be the fuel to make the wheels start turning within my head. I started at the beginning - the original piece of art done by Hokusai that focused on different views of Mount Fuji and based it on this location (more so in an abstract way - I decided this would be the perfect place of inspiration my person would go to to feel peaceful). As both the painting and the photograph focus so much on the aftermath of this gust of wind, I thought it would be nice to actually think about what happened before hand. 

I spent a lot of time just focusing on listening. The very top video is a piece of soundtrack from the original Twin Peaks that perfectly portrays the feelings of sadness, loss and ending, at least in my mind. It's peaceful but strong, something that really pulls at you but quietly so.

On the other hand, the second soundscape is drastically different. It's chaotic, loud and piercing; it's an interrupted story - almost as if it was broken and then glued back together. It's very unpleasant to listen to but it pushes further what we see visually.

Then lastly I thought I'd add something completely unrelated but fascinating - a podcast that focuses on a radio show in a fictional place. This made me realise just how much small details of description and noise can do to establish a mental image of what something looks like when there is no imagery to base this view on.


BIBLIOGRAPHY:

[1]  Kira Sidorova (2010) Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji from the Met for your enjoyment. 

At: http://www.galleryintell.com/thirty-six-views-mount-fuji/(Accessed on 14/2/18)

[2]  Sean O'Hagan (2015) Jeff Wall: 'I'm haunted by the idea that my photography was all a big mistake'. At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/03/jeff-wall-photography-marian-goodman-gallery-show (Accessed on 16/2/18)

windy.

The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneous than that.

I decided to go against what felt right. Out of all the images we were offered, I decided to purposefully choose the one that I liked visually but knew would have trouble conceptualising.

The other images were very packed with almost explosive visual sounds but A Sudden Gust of Wind really spoke to me in its style - faint, blush, pastel colours, the idea of a painted event becoming reality, the film-likeness of it, the seeming possibility of a single person being in multiple places, thereby creating a movement within a still. I could imagine the quiet breeze and softness of sound it could bring. It was a contrast to the intensity of the other paintings.

Ejiri in Suruga Province was one of Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

I like the thought behind Jeff Wall's image. It's a recreation, it's a beautiful serendipity but it's fully staged. It's sort of like a copy. It was a real moment turned into a drawing that then got recreated and frozen in time through an image. 

First notes:

sounds of paper,

whistle and chimes moving in wind, 

river and flow of water

To me wind and rain are escape, paper is creation and water is meditation. 

Recently I watched Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. It's a film about a bus driver who is also a poet. He starts his day writing, then listens to people chat on the bus, and then at lunch he goes to his favourite place - a waterfall - and keeps writing. 

For some reason that's exactly what I envision in this photograph. A journey in writing, if that makes sense. I realise it might be a strange approach but I've created a story that I want to create the soundscape for. I know what I want visually, so now I need to produce that within sound.

test pattern.

Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) is a 75 minute 35mm film that consists of a single static shot of the colour blue with voiceover written by Jarman himself. 

In Derek Jarman’s last film Blue, the monochrome glow of the projected frame echoes the artist’s fading eyesight, as the soundtrack evokes powerful images of the mental, physical and emotional strain caused by his terminal illness. Blue was completed in 1993, the year before Jarman succumbed to AIDS-related complications. [1] 

It features a variety of voices by actors including Tilda Swinton and musicians such as Brian Eno and Tony Hinnigan. The film's single colour was inspired by Jarman's visit to Tate where he found a monochrome painting by Yves Klein, hence the usage of 'International Klein Blue' pigment solution. This colour is described to be the experience of the journey from reality to the beyond.

The script, recited by actors and by Jarman himself, alternates poetry and narrative prose around different meanings and interpretations of the colour blue (melancholy, water, infinity, etc.), autobiographical episodes and invocations to a character called Blue. [1]

*

Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese artist and composer who currently lives in Paris. His test pattern project began in 2006, and his most recent one [N°12] was shown at The Store in The Strand last year. Above is test pattern [N°5]. In this test pattern Ikeda converts data into binary patterns that are generated in real-time, thereby submerging the viewer into a confusing, strange and chaotic environment that benefits greatly from the sound design. Loud, ear-piercing noises and long periods of silence don't allow the viewer to settle for a moment.

Probing the essential characteristics of sound and light, Ikeda’s work bridges the worlds of art and music and challenges fundamental preconceptions of both through the intensity of his installations. [2]

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

[1]  Derek Jarman: Blue. At: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/display/derek-jarman-blue (Accessed on 18/2/18)

[2] Anton Spice (2017) Ryoji Ikeda premieres mind-bending new A/V artwork test pattern [N°12] at Store Studios. At: https://thevinylfactory.com/news/ryoji-ikeda-new-test-pattern-n12-store-studios/ (Accessed on 20/2/18)