In last week's seminar (13/10/16) we explored the idea of sound as an art form in itself. For the first half of the lecture we went to different spaces around Sheffield town centre with the aim of just listening to and focusing on the sounds. 

We started in Sheffield Cathedral, where sounds tended to reverberate gently due to the lack of soft surfaces to absorb the sound. Footsteps and low murmurings were the predominant sounds to hear as well as the occasional door closing which would echo for longer than any other sounds. Next we went to the Peace Gardens stopping off at the fountains on the way and finally we finished at the train station. We were encouraged by lee to think imaginatively about how we could use the sounds. For instance, using the sound of the fountain splashing as the sound of waves crashing. 

After this we headed back to the university where we listened to a couple of experimental sound projects. I was particularly interested in "4 Rooms" by Jacob Kirkegaard.

Jacob Kirkegaard is an Artist from Denmark who specialises in sound, often using a scientific approach. In his album "4 Rooms" he records the ambient sounds from 4 different spaces in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The church, auditorium, swimming pool and the gymnasium. These were all rooms that Kirkegaard chose for their history as being meeting points for people when Chernobyl was an active town. For each room Kirkegaard would record 10 minutes of audio and would then play it back into the room and record another 10 minutes. He would do this for up to 10 times in each room. Each time he would leave the room and let the sounds unfold on their own. 

The audio tracks that was produced all had an eerie drone sound to it. When I first heard it I didn't know that the tracks were recorded in Chernobyl. I didn't personally find it enjoyable or indeed relaxing. But now I know that I was actually listening to sounds of Chernobyl. A place where one of the worst man made disasters happened and over 33 people died with many long lasting effects still being felt. My response now seems very reasonable and actually appropriate.

In an interview with Jacob Kirkegaard he says "I think we all prefer our emotions to grow from within ourselves rather than having them created for us. If we feel we’ve figured it all out, the emotions won’t be free or have the right effect. In order for emotion to grow freely from that unknown mysterious place deep within ourselves the sound must refrain from too much deliberate emotion and be devoid too many known references. What makes sound unique as a storytelling tool is that it can speak to us on a subconscious level, and thereby create magic". I think that this is exactly what I felt when I first heard "4 Rooms". Even with no idea of what I was listening too, the emotions that I think Kirkegaard was trying to express with this piece grew within me. 

4 Rooms is not something I will be listening too much but it is a great example of how emotions can be expressed in sound without it being obvious as to what I should feel.

(Chernobyl's Swimming Pool where Kirkegaard set one of his tracks)

In our seminar last week (6/10/16), we watched a number of short films and picked 1 film each, from the categories of Drama and Documentary, to write an analysis on.

The film I picked in the category of drama was a 2002 film called Salaryman by Jake Knight. It is a portrayal of a business man in Japan who works long hours. The main focus of the film was on the repetitiveness and how mundane the salaryman's day to day life was. Knight used powerful techniques such as wide angle locked down camera shots down long corridors and across vast repetitive blocks of flats. This emphasized endlessness and gives the impression that all these workers are simply numbers in a much larger system. The worker who features in this film says in his narration that his life is like a circle, it just repeats and he struggles to remember what he did yesterday. Knight takes this and veers away from the usual Hollywood narrative format by showing the end scene at the very beginning, thus showing visually this idea that his life is going round in a circle. I very much enjoyed this film as I think the director very successfully uses filming techniques to tell the story with very little actual narration. By using the above techniques and others, such as showing only mundane colours and a lack of vibrancy, he creatively introduces us the depressing world of a salaryman.

The next film I picked was a 2010 documentary film called Strange Lights by Joe King & Rosie Pedlow. It tells the tale of unexplained lights seen in the sky in 1980 in Rendlesham Forest by American service men at an RAF base. The main theme of the piece appears to be the replication of the events witnessed using modern day film and sound techniques and old radio recordings taken from the original night. The directors must have taken the idea of confusion and spookiness when the servicemen saw the lights and attempted to replicate it in a more abstract form with this piece. There is heavy use of timelapses throughout the film which show quite stunning images of stars moving in the night sky and bright illuminated campsites contrasting with the dark forest. I was not fully convinced however with the purpose of the timelapses as, while it did a good job of showing time moving fast and transitioning, it was not necessarily contributing to the story it was trying to tell. It made successful use of its sound design however using a multilayered design of distorted radio sounds and the actual recordings of the servicemen describing the lights they were seeing over their radio. There would be intermittent flashes of light shown on the screen that were synced with sudden loud bursts of radio distortion. This helped add weight to the flashes and showed that these resembled the lights the servicemen may have seen on the original light. While i believe the film did successfully show a good replication of what was seen and felt on that night, it did seem that film went on a bit too long for its on good especially when it was long abstract shots that could quickly lose the attention of an audience.

Hello. Welcome to my blog created for my course, Film and Media Production at Sheffield Hallam University. I will be using this blog to document and archive my creative development throughout my time here.

We kicked off our Creative Project Development and Realisation seminar last Thursday (29/09/16) with Lee Pearse. As a getting to know each other exercise we split into groups of 4 or 5 and wrote down our names, hometowns, the last film we saw and the last project we worked on. Here was the result:

Please ignore the bad drawing done by James. 

After this we compiled a list, in our groups, of websites that we often use for inspiration. The six main sites we came up with were:

• Netflix   (Great for instantly streaming movies and TV programmes)
• IMDB   (A useful database for films and TV with such info as all cast and crew, budgets, technical specs., reviews etc.)  
• Wikipedia   (An online encyclopedia that is a good starting point for reasearching films, people and ideas)
• The Guardian   ( A source of intelligent reviews and information about film releases)
• The Smalls   (Enables members to showcase work, network and discover creative opportunities)
• TV Tropes   (Another online encyclopedia for pop culture with catalogs of tropes in all media)

This seminar was a useful introduction and guide to the year ahead.