Experimental Project Evaluation
By Adam Young (Group C)
For my experimental project we were put
into groups of two to create an experimental sound clip and also an
experimental film.
My group consisted of myself and Andrew
Espley which was to our advantage as we both shared similar influences and
inspirations for both experimental sound and film such as, firstly for sound,
we were both fascinated on work from Delia Derbyshire. A great example of her
work we were inspired by was her experimental sound called Blue Veils and
Golden Sounds. We found this piece very interesting with its strange and haunting
sounds but with its quite beautiful flow throughout it. We aimed to achieve this
within our sound and therefore began discussing ideas and started planning.
Myself and Andrew decided to base our
experimental sound on everyday city sounds everyone would hear within a city.
We felt this would have more of a disturbing effect towards our target
audience, which was teenagers to above, because it would be taking something
that they are familiar with and adapting it to something so surreal. We
discussed how we would do this and planned to distort many of our collected sounds
within post-production.
Therefore on the day of production we
booked out a zoom recorder from Sheffield Hallam Universities Film and Media
department to spend the day collecting city sounds. This day consisted of
walking through Sheffield city centre and recording such sounds as traffic,
trains, walking and water fountains. We found this very interesting to do as
listening back to our recorded sounds we noticed lots of other city sounds we
did not even notice such as talking. Overall I felt recording went very well as
we managed to collect a lot of sound to work with for the editing process.
We had problems in post-production as we
firstly started to use Pro Tools sound editing software but we suffered
technical issues so therefore we could unfortunately begin our edit. We then
decided to use another sound editing software for our work. We approached
editing our sound with different techniques to create this disturbing and
unusual sound such as reversing sounds, changing the tempos and dropping
pitches. We found slowing the speed of the sound clips or speeding them up very
effective as well. Also to add a sense of different layers to the sound we used
echo effects, faded some clips in and out and repeated some of them to achieve
this feel for the listener. After this we later added “phaser, “wah wah”
effects and inverted the majority of them which gave the sound this huge sense
of irritation and disturbance. We noticed a lot of wind within a lot of our
sound but decided to fade it in and out because it also let off a strange
effect. We brought in the sound close to the beginning and then brought it out
close to the end to make a sense of our experimental sound having a beginning
and an end. From listening to our final edit we found it near impossible to
recognise these everyday sounds we had recorded and therefore felt satisfied
because this was our intention.
We were unsure on our final outcome of our
experimental sound and therefore let other fellow students, working on their
own experimental sound, listen and give feedback. We noticed, using the certain
speakers in our classroom, that some sounds would occasionally cut out as the
speakers could not manage the rising sound. This did not affect our feedback as
we were very pleased to hear they all thought it was very good and had an
interesting flow to it that created a disturbing scene in their imaginations. I
felt we worked very well as a pair to create the sound we did.
We then moved on to planning our approach
to our experimental film by researching on interesting techniques and styles
from other experimental films. We both found very interesting a short
experimental film by D.A Pennebaker called Daybreak Express from 1953. The
reason for this was from the way he shot lots of different parts of New York,
from a train, and mixed it together with jazz music to give the footage its
upbeat mood. With the added jazz music the experimental film felt it adapted to
more of a faster pace and became more exciting. At the beginning of the film it
has no music and therefore has quite a calm feel to it before the upbeat. This
inspired myself and Andrew as we wanted to do this with our own film to create
a short climax before the main flow of the film truly gets going. After
watching this we began to discuss the possibilities of using our experimental
sound for the beginning of the film.
We also gained inspiration from another
experimental film/music video which was made by Duvet Brothers, in 1984, for
the band New Orders song Blue Monday. The reason for our like towards it was
that throughout the film there is a clear divide within the different footage
that has been used. It’s obvious the inner message is to raise the fact that
there is a huge divide between rich and poor people in Britain because there is
footage of run down council houses with footage of Buckingham palace. There is
even a point where a sign appears saying “the poor get poorer”. Myself and
Andrew were fascinated by this as it is edited to have the complete same flow
but the inner layer of the film shows its true message that the film is split
into two.
We then began on idea development for our
experimental film by starting to discuss parts of Sheffield to shoot as we
already agreed we wanted to base the location of the film around Sheffield. We
wanted to use our experimental sound at the beginning but to have the film
break into another, more upbeat, sound. Our inspirational sound was a song
called “Touch Me” by The Doors. We knew we would not be allowed to use the song
over copyright reasons but we wanted to either find or invent an alternative
close to this. Eventually we found a song from a website you were able to
purchase music from for less than a pound but we were still unsure on if we
were allowed to use it. We also slightly mimicked the Blue Monday film we were
influenced from by planning a divide within our footage such as the art within
expensive prestige looking builds to old rundown buildings.
On the day of production we shot lots of
locations using a Canon D600 around Sheffield such as churches, the town hall
and other old prestige looking buildings which were mostly in the city centre.
This was very interesting as there was art work such as stone status near these
buildings. We then went on to collect lots of shots of abandon and half
destroyed buildings which was very interesting as they were only a 5 minute
walk from the city centre. We were intrigued with these buildings as they were
much more colourful than any other buildings we had spotted because they
consisted of great looking graffiti all over them. It was quite a safety hazard
shooting there since we had an expensive looking camera with us but we had no
bother what so ever. We also gathered footage of traffic, trains and big groups
of the public walking around Sheffield.
In post-production, to edit our
experimental film we used Final Cut Pro on the Macs provided for us two by
Sheffield Hallam University. After we transferred our footage onto Final Cut
Pro, we went on to organise its content so that we could begin our editing
process to complete our first draft. For our first draft we focused onto
creating our original idea and use the song we found and brought. We wanted to
be given feedback off a mentor after this so that we could have a clear answer
if we were allowed to use it or not. We added effects to the footage towards
the beginning with our experimental sound to make it look old and with the slow
motion effect added, it made it look very strange. These couple of shots were
of crowds of people walking and trains pulling into the station. When the song
began to play the mood and flow of the film became very upbeat which was what
we wanted. We highlighted this by editing the footage so it cut with the beat
of the song. Unfortunately we were told from feedback that we would not be
allowed to use the song but we got positive feedback towards the beginning of
the film. We then decided to take out the song and use our experimental sound
throughout the entire film. This meant we would have to just keep the experimental
film completely with the mood, we would have at the beginning, throughout.
Andrew had an idea of using photographs we
had taken and mix it together with our moving image footage we had shot as we
felt this would highlight the darker and creepier part of Sheffield in our
film. We made sure we created the clear contrast between both parts of
Sheffield we wanted. To do this we edited the film so that it jumps from one
type of building to another. We edited in the sound of the shutter on the camera
every time a photograph was to appear as we thought it was an interesting touch
to the film. We kept the same first 30 seconds of our original experimental
film as we felt it was a good intro and we had already received positive
feedback towards it. When it came to approaching editing our photos together we
decided we wanted to create the sense of movement by using stop motion
animation. With every next photo it would get closer and closer towards the
certain object or building. To create this we put the length of every
photograph to 0.15 seconds. We were very pleased with our final edit outcome.
Personally I think our experimental sound
and film went very well together considering we originally shot for another
mood that was not disturbing like our sound. Although furthermore, I feel if
myself and Andrew were to re-do this project again we would get different
approaches. Firstly I feel, especially with our experimental sound, we would
make a clearer motive to follow for our film as within pre-production and even
in shooting we were still unsure on one mood to create in our film. Secondly we
would have made sure from our planning stage if it was expectable to use the
song we wanted or not as this lead to extra time re-editing. Even after
mentioning these signs of improvement I still feel very positive with our final
outcome.
As a group I felt we worked very well and
both shared our own input to successfully create the experimental sound and
film we have made. On the day of production I told Andrew of the buildings with
graffiti on them because I had walked past them only days before so knew of
their whereabouts. We both equally recorded sound and footage for our edit and
both were in the edit suites editing the film together. Andrew edited the
experimental sound on his own as the software we decided to use was not
available to us from the Macs in the edit suites. Overall I felt we shared the
work load except in post-production when I felt Andrew had done more because of
the experimental sound.
Throughout this project I have learnt
technically a lot more about effects within editing as it was very interesting
to discuss and test out different effects to create the disturbing mood I feel
we achieved with our experimental project. This made me appreciate the approach
to editing more in a different way. I also feel I have learnt skills creatively
more towards idea development because I feel the way me and Andrew discussed
and built our ideas was really productive towards our experimental project.
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