People to People – Ideas

   When I thought about interesting people to document in my project, my mind went awol! I had to think back to my home up north and identify potential stories. Two really hit the spot.

   One, a man called David Wade, an art teacher and head of sixth form, is very interesting. Working backwards – he is now the head of a sixth form and fully operates them effectively (also encouraging interests, travelling and extra-ciriculum activities); is an art teacher of tremendous ability; has worked for the police force; studied fine art and graphic design at university; ran away from home in India to go to university and get a better life; was born to a colonist family and moved to India at a very early age; struggled at academics at school (due to dyslexia discovered at university) but found a passion for art and was good at long distance running.
   As well as footage of David, I would also incorporate photographs he has that document his life and also footage of maps.

   The second person I thought about is a woman who I shall refer to as Claire. A sufferer of manic depression since her childhood and the unexpected life change of having a child while she was 17 and 18, led her to experimenting with drugs during her late teens – particularly heroin. As she moved into her twenties, Claire was an addict.  Her life was hard, consisting of abusive partners, addiction sickness and low income. Due to the state she was in, the drugs helped her escape the life she hated; a life she hated because of the drugs. Addicts will do anything for their needs and Claire ended up working at a brothel; the only way she could fund her addiction. But there was a light at the end of her tunnel. She had had two children. And they needed a mum. They were looked after but it spurred Claire to get clean. In 1998, Claire woke one morning knowing she was going to die but how could she do that with so much to live for.

Everyone knows addictions are hard to kick…heroin is probably the worse. Their are stories of addicts committing disgusting acts (such as with animals) to not suffer the pain and illness getting clean. But Claire went cold turkey by herself and got off the smack.

She then met a man who I will refer to as William. She was madly in love with him and he her. It seemed like life was perfect. Then life took another hurtful turn toward Claire. In 2005, William had a completely unexpected heart attack. Claire could not physically and mentally cope with his death and turned to another drug, amphetamine, to escape. She was addicted to this drug for four years, eventually admitting herself to Lynfield Mount Hospital (a mental health hospital in Bradford) for sixth months to get herself off the amphetamine. With (now three) children to be a mum for, with the help of Lynfield Mount and with a will stronger than stone, Claire got clean in 2009, vowing never to abuse drugs again.

  Although Claire got off the drugs, they still affected her health. She suffers from Psychosis and epilepsy as a (common) side effect to phet; she suffers Raynards disease from the smack. Claire also has Hepatitis C. This is not a result of being a dirty addict (a clean addict uses clean needles/doesnt share paraphernalia/safe sex etc) but from an old partner as he attempted a home made tatoo on her – it’s worth noting he only pricked her twice and not even deep into her skin. Claire’s story is full of love; her story is not just “I was an addict, now I am clean” it’s actually “Look what drugs did to me”.

I am going to go with Claire for the documentary project. She is up for it as long as her identity is not revealed, I dont post the video on the internet (facebook, youtube, vimeo etc) and in the future, I make a fuller document to bring awareness of post-addiction diseases and conditions. The one problem is that Claire lives in my hometown Bradford so filming may be an issue.

My Poetic Eyes

Evaluation and Analysis Of Audio Drama

I feel our audio drama was a success. We have followed the conventions of audio drama; these being it was purely audio with no footage and also it was a fictional piece.  It also was a success because it sounds like a telephone conversation, it acts like a set of voicemail message and the monologues sound authentic and not fake.

The fact we had monologues which are in the style of a one way conversation creates the illusion that this is a message left for someone. The different levels of emotion different people gave to their monologues made sure the audio was not dull. The girlfriend was upset and slightly angry toward Jason. The best mate, although sympathetic, was enquiring as to what Jason was doing. The sister, completely not part of the narrative toward Jason cheating on his girlfriend, help break up the seriousness. The angry friend of Jason’s girlfriend showed true aggression, hostility and negative face toward Jason.

The way we kept the messages relative shot and snappy but still proving a point is typical of voice mails. People do not leave long winded message of several minutes as this normally happens as a result of engaging conversation. The slight distortion to the quality of the audio help keep the appearance of a telephone message – a slight loss of audio quality is common in telephone calls.

The inclusion of Jason leaving a message telling people to leave a message, the woman with the automatic voice saying ‘you have X no. of messages’ and the tone beeps also helped keep the illusion of a phone call. We wanted the audience to believe in our product as a real text rather than something we just made up.

Something I think was extremely successful in our project was the way the script was relatively free form. We had an outline of the language and emotion the actors had to portray in certain narrative ways – i.e. the hostile friend, the caring sister etc – but apart from that, the actors were given little direction leaving them free to improvise. This helped keep the monologues sharp, crisp and most importantly not fake. Fake dialogue is terrible and would have completely brought the project down.

I feel the voicemail idea worked quite well. It was constructed in a manner that meant it was precise and too the point and also that it stuck to the conventions and codes we needed to pull off a convincing voice mail message. The editing really helped pull it all together, making it flow from one message to another, with the audio levels the same and irrelevant speech deleted. I think a live drama could have added a bit more zest to the project. We had a little real dialogue in it and a conversation. But in reflection, it may not have been enough.

All in all i am pleased with our project. It is successful in fulfilling its intention – to sound like voicemail messages – with essential sounds being used to make this happen.

Sonic Postcard – Production and Editing

The cities shopping centre is a bustling and noisy place, so we headed there to get some audio recordings. We would walk about with the recorder in action and just pick us noises of everyday life and people going about their business. We also got a lot of conversation as well. We decided to stop for a moment and take in the sounds and noises around us. To do this we closed our eyes and focused on listening (as the lack of one sense is normally compensated by another over sensitive one). There were certain sounds we decided we liked and wished to record.

The first was of people selling newspapers. The Big Issue and Telegraph were ones we picked out. We got both women and men saying these newspaper names in their own way. We also heard the sound of escalators and tried to record them, though the microphone didn’t pick it up too well and we scraped that idea. We did however follow the escalators into the shopping centre’s centre where we noticed a lift with a woman’s voice saying ‘Doors Opening/Closing’. We though this could sound amazing during the final piece so it got recorded.

We sat down for lunch and whipped out our grub and the Marataz 660s. As we were in a large canteen, there was so much noise which consisted of eating noises (jangling cutlery etc), conversation, laughter and other such things.

We passed a convenience store and managed to obtain audio of trollies rattling along the cobbled streets. Someone in the group is a smoker and we noticed that the striking, grating noise of their lighters (as they struck the flint) was particularly interesting and so that got recorded also.

So with our bags of sound we headed into the editing suit. Without going in to precise detail of every audio sound, we managed to section different select sounds and noises in our audio. These were taken out, some combined or overlapped, others were played as bridges in the audio. There were some sounds that we put together which had a slight beat to them so we used that to create a rhythmic tempo in the piece.

We had a crazy idea of playing the audio file we had created backwards. At first we assumed it would sound tacky and horrible although it turned out the sounds worked well into feeding into each other and so we kept it in.

Certain sounds fitted well together and therefore we decided to make them into a motif. This would be played at different times during the whole audio piece. An audience will recognise the motif every time it gets played. We felt as a whole that the motif actually had quite a catchy beat so we hope that the audiences pick up on this and immerse themselves in the audio.

We decided to keep the length of the sonic postcard relatively short. This was a result of the styles and types of audio that we included. Had it been a more musical piece aesthetically, we may have made it longer. It is however, a series of sounds which we felt, if played for too long, may loose the audiences interest.

Sonic Postcard – Research and Planning

A Sonic Postcard appears to be a piece of audio track that is played in relation to anything the creator wants it to be. We were shown a number of these in our lecture
http://260mc.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/being-creative-with-sound/
I particularly loved the wood falling although I think more could have been done with it to say make it more musical. I then looked at the links on the blog and learnt more about what sonic postcards entail. Also, it was interesting what people have interpreted a sonic postcard as for themselves.

Different people from different social backgrounds have created completely different styles of sonic postcards. On the website http://www.sonicpostcards.org I sampled clips from children playing and the communication between them and adults (I presume to be parents or teachers). I also found people creating music from sounds in the street. The possibilities and combination of styles is vastly diverse.

My Glasses Crew group got together and immediately had tonnes of idea about what we could do for our project. One strong idea was recording people saying emotive words in different manners, in different tones and pitches and creating them, in terms of musicality, in to some sort of tune. However, we deciding against this as the brief was about what our world sounded like. We thought clips from situations we find ourselves in every day would be more appropriate. We would collect a great number of these, then choose out interesting sounds that occurred, then put them together to create some sort of melodic structure.

Audio Drama – Production and Editing

The piece of equipment we used to record was a Marataz 660 with a directional microphone. Once we had familiarised ourselves with it’s fuction, we set out to record.

We recorded the actors in roles of the characters we created, and let them improvise with very little direction. This allowed them more flexibility to get into the character. However, we were a man down so i stepped forward =D. I was recorded as the Jason’s friend.

Once we had the initially clips of audio, we played them to other peers. There was a mixed response in the feedback we got. We only went in with raw audio, we had edited it, trimmed it down and placed it in a predetermined order but had not added beeps, answer phone voices or other telephone related sounds. Some comments were on how dull it was. They appreciated it was not yet finished and only contained recorded audio but it was too flat, there was no conversation. Another prominent comment was to reduce the level of distortion we had used – however, we felt that audio quality was lost as it was being played through laptop speakers as opposed to the big speakers we had used.

So we went back to the drawing board and made some changes. Firstly, Jason’s voicemail recording needed to change and as we could not get hold of the actor who had previously done it, I did the voice of Jason. Scott then re-recorded what I had said as Jason’s mate, although he made him more concerned about Jason’s situation and less judgemental. It worked better. Champion. We had given up trying to work with the actors by this point and instead used Ally as the answer phone voice. She sounded rather authentic I felt.

Bearing in mind the comment that our audio was too ‘flat’ we decided to include a conversation in it, rather than just monologues. We had tried this when I had done the voice for Jason’s friend, with someone interrupting me and asking me a question about the situation and me discussing it with them. It clearly did not work. So this time we decided to pull the conversation out of the voicemails, over the top of them. We proposed that Jason had just got back from a trip; so he starts to go through his numerous voicemails; during which his mum walks into his room (we made a knocking door noise) and engages him in conversation.  After we put all the audio clips together and overlayed the conversation all we had then to do was include the beeps which we found on a free sound clip program.

I think it’s a successful Audio Drama. One note. Never work with actors. The act like actors. Not like people with excellent acting skills!

Some pics of the editing stage:

   

Audio Drama – Research and Planning

I looked at audio dramas that had being created to find out what constitutes one. Basically, it is a narrative driven sound recording with no visual companion and is normally a dialogue (with the inclusion of monologues).

Here is an example I found of a amateur (though well done) audio drama.

I was familiar with institutions audio dramas such as The Archers and also Terry Wogan’s Janet and John:

watch?v=E8U612YLjHQ

Having listened to a few of these, my group, The Glasses Crew, met up to discuss how we could create an audio drama based around the life of Jason Calvert. After much of this we decided upon doing something a little different to a normal audio drama; this being a telephone call. This idea the developed into voicemail messages.

The audio drama still followed a narrative. Jason has been up to no good and snogged a girl in a nightclub…despite having a girlfriend. We could create hostility into the drama from this idea. Jason, being a young person, has carried out something which audiences can identify with. We stereotyped Jason into what some people may think of young people – acting without care or responsibility or consequences.

We developed a number of characters for the drama:

– Jason, the main character. He would have a ‘you’ve reached Jason, please leave a message’ message at the beginning as audiences instantly identify the audio drama as being a voicemail.
– His (now ex-)girlfriend. She would have a sob story about how much Jason had hurt her etc.
– His ex’s friend. This character would criticise Jason for his actions siding with her friend.
– His friend. This character would be asking what the hell Jason was playing at. He needed to call him urgently and explain why he did what he did.
– The ‘other girl’. We felt this added charm to the narrative as well as a bit of cheeky humour.
– Jason’s Sister. This character was created to break up the intensity of the narrative. She plays no fluidity to the narrative although she would reinforce Jason having so many voicemails (we decided we would be travelling as this was his hobby in the CofC we created for him – she would ask how his trip was).

We then had to decide how we were going to go about doing production. First and foremost, who would play the characters. We make contact with actors and did some voice tests. Once we knew what skills of actors we had to work with, we moved onto the pre-production work.

We decided to not constrict our actors with a script as improvisation would sound more natural and more like a voicemail. We briefed each member about what they should say, for example, to the chappy playing Jason ‘say your name, your not available because your in **** and to leave a message and you will get back to them’. For the girlfriend it would be a sob story about how hurt she is etc. The sister would ask how his trip was. His friend would ask him to call him back and ask what he was doing cheating on his girlfriend. His girlfriends mate would have a go at him. Finally the ‘other girl’ would express her enjoyment of their experience together and ask to perhaps rekindle their passion.

We then listed what we would need to do to make these messages sound genuine. We decided to record a woman’s voice saying the usual jargon automatic voicemail things ‘ you have one new message, to listen to your messages…..’ There was to be seven messages from the characters, broken up with beeps as typical of voicemails. We also decided that we would record clean audio, then during post-production, we could add distortion to make it sound more like a phone line – this was so we could make the audio sound a bit distorted whereas we could not undistorted bad, unclean audio.