Amy Hanley’s Peer Portrait

For my Peer Portrait in New Wave Radio, I have teamed up with Amy Hanley.

My aim was to create a rich audio vignette using voice over, original music and archived sounds, I wanted the audio to be dynamic with a good volume level sans distortion. I also wanted to explore vocal montage as heard in Just Another Fish by Molly Menschell.

This very short biography of Amy looks at her passions and aspirations, I had given Amy a run down of some questions that I was going to ask a formal recorded interview just incase there were topics that were off limits.

The recording began at The National Gallery of Victoria where I gathered sounds of the fountain. From there, we trekked to RMIT in the hope that someone in the AV department might be so kind as to lend us a sound proof both. Techie and true gentleman Lambros was our knight in shining audio/visual equipment that afternoon.

My questions to Amy for the interview were fairly simple; favourite movie, favourite music, who were her influences and what had inspired her through life, hobbies and profundities etc. It  became  evident that the ocean has played a big part in Amy’s life, she is a surfer from the West Coast. Naturally, I felt that water could be a good motif element throughout my piece.

The recording device that I used was an H6 Zoom recorder, set to the X/Y axis microphones. A tripod mount for the H6 might have minimised some of the inconsistencies in the audio, as my fatigued arm was struggling to remain still for 20 minutes as I held the device up to the optimum distance from the subject.

The music was my own, it was recorded with a Rode NT1000 microphone and a VST piano on Protools, the edgy opening sound was from the www.freesounds.org file sharing database.

I was most happy with the sound of Amy’s voice, her story (though most of it ended up on the cutting room floor so to speak) and the reflexive introduction. I was most torn by the ambiguity of the duration set in the brief, do I produce 30” or or 2’30”?, and further to this, I most challenged by the compression of 20 magical minutes to 30 seconds. But, one of the biggest hurdles that I faced and am still facing right now as I write, is one involving software. I run Protools and I have it on my iMac at home and in order to put this on my new laptop, I have been advised to update the software though this has caused major problems such as a vicious white noise file conversion. I’m back and forth with Avid tech support and I’ll spare you the jargon and the tears because luckily, I bounced a draft copy to which I am using for this submission.

Protools

Protools

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– Menschel, M. (2005) Just Another Fish Story, Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, audio, USA

– Oymaldonado, Guitar Feedback 2, shared on www.Freesounds.org

-Thank you to Yield’s Tin Llama for the use of their SoundCloud site.

Spellbound – Stream of Consciousness

“To paint with a finer brush”, that was something that my acting teacher constantly told us in class. Explore the minute detail in something small and seemingly insignificant, and make it huge for you.  For example, imagine the feel of a blanket that you got when you were a child and see if that brings up any dormant emotions, or think about shaving cream on your skin and how your pours react to it, one could concentrate on the joint of their little finger and feel how it reacts with the surrounding tendons. Now, the lights are up and curtain is drawn so. . . walk on stage and perform!

There is infinite power in the stillness that is produced from heightened concentration in a performer, as the mind is still and blank, the eyes are therefore relaxed the breathing regulated and the person is ultimately calm. The senses are heightened, reactions became honest and the viewer is able to fill in the action void with their own take on what the character is thinking and will eventually do. In relation to the points addressed in Daniel’s lecture, dust seems small and insignificant, however, if one thinks about it, dust holds many things; fibres of fabric, microscopic organisms, flakes of skin, hair, tiny minerals… and if you keep thinking about it, what shape are they? Are they spherical, slate shape, crystal shape, spiky? The variations are immeasurable! So, according to my teacher, after several hours of this sort of heightened concentration, you are now unshakable in front of a camera or a large audience. Having witnessed and experienced this for myself, I have developed a new sensitively for the power of insignificant detritus.

The dust can make you sneeze, the dust can impel you to wipe it off the bookshelf once in a while, but it can also turn a performance inside out and back to front and leave viewers spellbound.

Closing In on the P4 Concept

We’re getting closer to establishing our P4 premise and I am really impressed with the ideas that have been workshopped so far. Sal and Tim worked like a machine today coming up with some great concepts.

Our project statement is yet to come though our goals are clear; to produce a high quality product in a medium that neither of us have explored… that’s in a nutshell.

We spoke a lot about the history of our set task, mediums, and frequently referenced Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan who coined the notion of the medium as the message.

Our team (we really need a name) created a shared folder in Google Drive and entered minutes, ideas, meeting times and meeting places that work best for us. We will need to convene outside the classroom though, should we not be able to attend these meetings for whatever reason, team (insert name) agreed that Skype would be our go to form for beating the drum. Aptly, the media that we may choose to communicate our ideas through will most certainly become the message.

Stay tuned!

Sal's aesthetic mind map creation.

Sal’s aesthetic mind map creation.

Should Piet Mondrian’s Legacy Be Hailed As Something More Than Just a Building?

 

Piet Mondrian

Highrise apartment block in South Yarra (2015)

 

Piet Mondrian’s work catalogue has recently moved into the public domain as it is 70 years after his death. This building in South Yarra has snapped it up quicker than you can say ‘neoplasticism’.

Is this really the best way to celebrate such an inspirational artist?

Piet_Mondriaan

The original hipster Piet Mondrian 1899

 

John Cage

John Cage!

I am having a major ‘tree falling in the woods’ moment… just like I had had with Mark Rothko and Marcel Duchamp’s work. John Cage leaves a gaping hole in the aesthetic experience, he subverts our expectations, he is taking the micky out of you and me yet I can’t look away!