Paperwork for Maps and Networks

Maps and Networks Developed Idea

After a lot of consideration, Nicole and myself decided our idea of using the butterfly effect as a short film was a much too linear and narrative idea for our installation piece. We hadn't properly thought outside the box about what we could do with an installation and we were just looking at making another film with a regular plot.
We also began to realise that logistically with just the two of us we would probably have a lot more work to do than we had anticipated.
With this in mind we decided to change what we were doing. We didn't want to change it completely though, so we decided to just adapt what our initial idea was, which was about the connections between people.
Nicole came up with the idea initially for our butterfly effect piece, which was to use more than one screen within a screen to show different things that were going on.

Johann Pascual was someone we stumbled across whilst looking for research for our 'butterfly effect' idea. We really liked the idea of using multiple frames in our piece, and this inspired us to move away from our rigid idea of a short film and make us decide to branch out a bit. 

This was the kind of thing we wanted to go for with our piece. Not with as many different boxes as this but something similar. We then deviated from our initial idea into maybe using three side by side boxes to show different objects being used to try to communicate between people. 

We also found this video installation art on Vimeo that had the 3 screens side by side in a way that was similar to what we wanted. There is really nice imagery in this piece, and all the colours and tones match throughout the work. It's clearly of the same or similar place and has an eerie melody being sung throughout the piece. 

What I took from this piece is that the woman is always in the middle. We want our work to be similar to this in that all the important parts happen in the middle screen. Our characters would be either side and the passing of objects would be in the middle.

Something else I like about this piece is that most of the movement also happens in the middle emphasising it's importance, the outer two screens have very little motion compared, and the woman doesn't often appear outside of the middle screen. This I thought was interesting, as a way of keeping peoples attention mostly focused on the one area. This is an issue Nicole and myself discussed, as when we make our piece we don't want there to be too much going on so that people don't know where to look.

When people do appear outside the middle screen, there is a peak in interest as it's a break in what's been happening for the rest of the film. It was a useful tool to think about using, just having motion in the outer screens occasionally to further involve the viewer.

At a couple of points in the film the characters from the outer screens cross over into the middle screen which I think is really effective as it happens so rarely. It reminds us that they're in the same world but just doing different jobs, and sometimes these overlap. 

"Stormwater" 3 screen video art installation by Tom Skipp from estrellasonora - Tom Skipp on Vimeo.

So instead of thinking of the butterfly effect and literally the procession of events, we moved on with the idea of connections between individuals, and and how people struggle to communicate what they want to say.

The basic set up would be this;

three screens, the left one with a woman, the right one with a man, and the middle one as some sort of no mans land , which they keep crossing in to but missing each other.

The idea was that they are both trying to communicate but can't. We experimented with the idea of technology and how different generations struggle to get across what they mean when they're talking to each other, and also looking at how teenagers these days have been raised with technology and it's very natural for them to be using it, and how that contrasts with people of older generations to whom it is a very alien concept. 

With this in mind, we thought of one of our characters using just old fashioned technologies, and the other using modern ones.

We arranged it so the woman on the left would be the one using the old fashioned items such as books, letters, radios, and the man on the right would be using items such as an iPod and an iPhone.
I also wanted to link this to Tom Skipps 3 screen video art piece by having the most important parts of the film occurring the the centre screen. I really loved the ending of the film where the man crosses over into the middle screen and picks something up, I think it was a really effective use of the crossover and Nicole and I wanted to show that in our work.

Editing

To begin with I created several mono tracks for the sounds I recorded in the sound studio, and began to play around with inserts to see if I could make them sound more fairytale like. I soon decided that I thought the effects made the clips sound tacky and I didn't like the effect of them at all.

I then imported the rest of my sounds from the Roland into my pro tools session and named all the clips appropriately so I could keep track of them throughout the edit. 

I began to layer up the sounds with my voiceover in mind, and with them building up slowing and peaking at intensity in the middle. 

With my sound piece I was aiming to keep a fairytale, sort of creepy, haunting effect going throughout, as in Grimms' fairytales especially,  fairytales were rarely all light and fluffy and usually had much darker undertones when you read the original. This is why in my piece, although the part that is read out is the beginning of the fairytale, the soundscape is actually quite creepy (well that's what I was aiming for). I wanted this to be the case as one the surface, a fairytale is a sweet story with happy endings but when you look deeper into them they are actually pretty messed up at times.

I used a recording of the opening of a book at the beginning of the piece to emphasise that it was the start of a story, and used a lot of fade in/outs through the work so that everything flowed together well.

As I suspected I did run into a few issues with wind noise in the background of some of the clips I recorded outside. I then discovered a way to use the inserts that was actually really useful to me, I used the frequency shifter to remove certain frequencies from the clips such as the wind. This made them sound so much clearer and I was really glad I changed my mind about using the effects.

I also raised the pitch of some of the clinking sounds to make them sound higher and slightly more etherial which I wanted so they matched the theme more.

I had to spend a long time correcting the sound on my piece as for some reason through my editing I had repeatedly adjusted the sound on individual clips and turned them down, so overall my piece was very quiet but there were a few sounds that seemed were relatively quiet but actually caused the sound to peak, such as clicks or snaps. I had to either take down the volume for those particular tracks or cut the sounds out. I also tried compressing the piece but I found that doing that made the whole piece sound different to what it was and so I decided that the areas that were effecting the sound I could either remove without taking anything from the overall piece or just make quieter with fade ins etc.

Recording Sounds

As my text extract is from a fairytale, I wanted the sounds I used to reflect that in my work. Following this theme I decided to use a lot of natural sounds in my work. To record my sounds I used a mix of sound studio and field recording. 

In the studio I brought with me a large variety of items to use, such as rice, wooden items, water and glass. I asked my friend to help me so that I could record the sounds from the operating room and she could use the items I brought with me in the recording booth to makes different noises with. 

We experimented with using the same item in different ways to create more than one sound I could use, which meant I would have a lot of stuff to pick from in the edit, and it's always better to have options later on, when I won't be able to book out the sound studio again in time.

I just tried to think of any sound you would associate with a fairytale and tried to recreate that, such as tinkley sounds, or hooves, rain, chains clinking, fires crackling or walking/running and any number of things that I could imagine in a fairytale setting.

I made sure I saved all of my sounds to my hard drive to use later on when it came to editing.

Then I used a Roland to go out and record a lot more natural sounds. I went to a local park, and using the Roland I recorded leaves rustling, walking through dead leaves, knocking on old wooden doors and creaking gates. I was worried that there would be a lot of wind noise and tried to stop it as much as I could, although I knew it was inevitable that some would get through. It was unfortunately, a very windy autumn day.

A week or so after I had recorded the sounds for the soundscape, I booked the sound studio out again and I asked someone I know on the creative writing and journalism course to come and help me out by reading out my text extract. 

She was more than willing to oblige and really enjoyed trying out different voices with the extract, some of which were hilarious as she is rather good at accents.

In the end I tried to keep it simple, and knew I'd end up using the first take. This one she had recorded without faltering, was very clear and spoke in such a way as that I knew I probably wouldn't need to record anything else all morning. 

Nonetheless I had booked out the studio so I decided to carry on anyway, and at one point she whispered her way through the text which I made me hesitate in my decision to use the first recording we did. I then thought about another way in which I could incorporate both.

It was a very successful morning until I realised later on I had exported my files in the wrong format and had to go back to the recording suite with my sound tutor and re-export my sounds correctly - nearly had a heart attack when I first realised, but luckily they were still saved on the computer.

Learning Pro Tools

Pro Tools

Last year we had to create a soundscape as a part of our course and we were taught how to use Adobe Audition to complete it. This term however we were taught to use a completely new sound editing software called Pro Tools. At first this was very disorientating as the layout was completely different and it was the first software we had been exposed to really that wasn't Adobe, however once we got the hang of the basics it became clear that they are really quite similar - of course they would have to be as they are merely different tools to create the same thing. 

We were first of all shown how to import sounds into the clips folder and into tracks. We were shown how to rename clips and tracks so we can keep our edit window organised. 

We were also shown how to cut and edit different sounds together and how to use different tools on clips such as the fade in, overlay, highlight, cut, slow down/speed up and others as well.

Research for Text Extract for Sound

It took me a long time to find the right text piece for my sound project as we had no limitations on what we could use. This meant I could pick literally anything I wanted and even write something myself if I wanted.
Initially I thought about looking in religious texts such as the Bible, but decided that quite a lot of people would be doing that and changed my mind. I knew I definitely didn't want to write it myself as I would have no idea where to begin, and realised that getting something from a book would be my best chance.
At first I began to look at poems such as 'Do not go gentle into that good night' By Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I loved the imagery of the piece and the descriptions incorporated in the stanzas were amazing but I couldn't decide what segment would be best to use for my project and I couldn't imagine the soundscape in my mind, there would have been a lot of different ways I could go with it! 

After a while I moved on, and began looking at books such as 'Infernal Devices' (K.W. Jeter) which I thought would have a lot of descriptive text in it due to the steampunk theme. I thought the way the author wrote about different machines would be really cool to create a soundscape for. Unfortunately there wasn't a segment I found that jumped out at me, the book is also written in first person and is more about describing that persons emotions - which, while that would be cool to create a soundscape for someones emotions, it wasn't really what I had in mind for what I wanted to do with this piece.

I also looked at 'Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children' (Ransom Riggs) and I found a couple of segments that I almost used but decided against as I couldn't settle on which one I liked most. 

Eventually I decided to try something else, and started looking at the most basic type of story there is - fairytales.

The one that I found that spoke out to me the most was the original introduction to 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.'

Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when the flakes of snow were falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black ebony. And whilst she was sewing and  looking out of the window at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell upon the snow. And the red looked pretty upon the white snow, and she thought to herself, what if I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window-frame.

I thought that the visual descriptions used in the piece had a really pleasant aesthetic and the simplicity of the writing allowed me a lot of creative freedom with my sound piece, so I decided that this would be the text extract that I would use.