'The Life Size Zoetrope' and 'Life and Stuff' Reflection

Two experimental short films that I have come across which are similar to our concept are 'The Life Size Zoetrope' and 'Life and Stuff' featured on the FutureShorts website. Both of these short films are useful to refer to when developing our idea, as the theme of life is what we are focusing on within our concept of memories flashing before your eyes in a situation of death.

 

The Life Size Zoetrope(Dir. Mark Simon Hewis)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-75uRHYHWE

 

I really like the cinematography and visual style of this short film, as well as the way that the narrative is told through a mix of both voiceover narration and other background sound use. The pace of the visuals is also interesting and something that we could incorporate into our idea when we add visuals to our audio piece at a later stage. The main aspect of this short film that I have taken away and considered also applying within our own audio as well as visual project is the way in which the start of the piece is repeated at the end, in order to tell the story in a non linear structure. We could perhaps do this with the sounds of beeping hospital machines, or even just a simple concept such as somebody breathing, without the need for a voiceover narration. The short film seems quite busy in terms of the pace as well as mixture of sounds used alongside the visuals, which works well in creating a sense of urgency or feeling of a fast paced life for the audience.

Life and Stuff
(Dir. Kumar Satjunarasa, UK, 2011)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWrmAuEwKRs

This short film has been useful to come across in my research as we are developing our idea, as it features a voiceover narration of a series of events within a single lifetime. Although at this stage we do not aim to include a voiceover narrating our project, this could be an option at a later stage if our concept is still not coming across strongly enough to our audience. I also think we would like to achieve something similar to the simplicity of this short film; the mixture of sounds at the beginning and the end and the background sounds in between. The pace of the piece also adds to the intensity of fitting in a lifetime's worth of memories in a few minutes worth of visuals and audio. This has inspired me to think about the development of our project, in terms of how we could use pace as a tool to create a build up of narrative development within recreating memories. I like the idea of slowing down the sounds that are reflections of the memories within the later stages of life, and speeding up the older, more distant memories. I also like the idea of attaching this with a theme of memory loss as the person is aging mentally as well as physically, in a non- linear structure, although I am not sure that this would be possible given the short running length of the piece.

 

Post - Crit. session feedback - Development of concept

After our crit. session last Thursday (14/11/13), we received some very useful feedback from the rest of the seminar group on our idea as well as initial first cut of our audio project. We are aware after listening to our sound piece through speakers that it sounds quite different to when we had previously listened back to it, and that our main development at the moment needs to be focused upon coming up with solutions as to how we can clearly communicate to the listener the idea behind the piece, which is to be taken through a lifetime of memories in a 'flashing before your eyes' sense through the use of audio .

Some useful feedback that we received suggested possible ideas as to how we could show the development of the different stages of a lifetime in such a short amount of time. With this in mind, we have begun to further work upon the idea of showing weakness from the suggestion below, and a deteriorating state of mind.

Another piece of useful feedback that we received was the idea of including sounds associated with achievements throughout a lifetime, which would help the listener to establish that our piece is a journey through different memories within different stages of a lifetime.

 

With this in mind, I have created a list of the different stages of growing up, and some possible sounds that we could gather which are associated with each of these stages. I found this feedback session very helpful towards the development of our idea, as the concept seems a lot more simplified and easier to work with now, and the feedback received has helped us to explore further areas around how we can go about communicating our idea to our audience.

 

Sense of Place audio project - Inspiration and Experimentation

Inspiration

Films

I have been researching and watching some films that I feel can be used to demonstrate how sound usage can contribute to the idea of exploring a memory or journey of the mind. These have  inspired me to think of new ways of creating our memory inspired audio project on the theme 'sense of place'. Two films that I have watched and found to be particularly useful in my research so far are Donnie Darko (2001) and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (2004).

Locations

After discussing the possibilities for the future visual content to go alongside this project in the tutorial session, we have been thinking about how to make use of the spaces that are easily accessible and available to us everyday. For this reason, instead of our original initial idea of the visuals being based on a train journey with a window view, we have developed and expanded upon this idea further to come up with a list of possible windows we could use in the visuals. This could be applied as an overall theme to the project ; the windows as objects could be used to direct the narrative and create the impression of the memory montage from the subject's point of view, which could be done even without the need to show the subject in the visuals at all.

Some possible examples of these could be:

A series of windows through another window - in order to generate ideas around the subject of watching and the passing of time, as well as to show the subject's physical location - in this case inside looking outside.

I like the idea of using space as an object - Gaining a closer up view through a window, to create an entirely different meaning, e.g. this door close up could be seen and interpreted as a subject being trapped, whereas the further away shot shows it in its real sense and does not leave much room for exploring narrative interpretations.

Another concept that I have thought about is using smaller spaces to convey meanings (e.g. through key holes, viewers on opposite sides of doors etc.). An idea which is appealing to me is that as the pace as well as tone of the piece progresses, the windows get smaller in size to mirror the subject's emotions/state of mind. This idea would mean that we would also not have to show the subject in person at all visually, but instead focus on the strength of the audio for now. The changing sizes in the windows could be used to represent the memory moving further away from the subject's mind, as they are trying to focus on their personal journey (shown through the visuals) and forget and move on from the memory.





Experimental Audio

The main thing that I am exploring with my research, and would also like to incorporate into my own project is the idea of creating something unordinary out of the ordinary through the use of sound. I wanted to explore some basic, everyday sound and listen back to see if any new ideas or inspirations came to mind. I recorded a few minutes of audio beside an open window, purely to listen back to and discover new thoughts on where else this could have been recorded, other than the location that it was originally. I found this to be a very useful exercise as it has made me realise that for our audio project we won't need to overcomplicate things and can instead find a very simple idea and location and experiment with transforming it into something entirely new.