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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