Heading into this assignment I was confident in the choice of prompts and decided to challenge myself to using a DSLR and Zoom recorder rather than my phone as I have experimented with my phone in the past. I am glad I made this decision as I was pleased with the quality of the material as it was eventually presented and feel that it forced me to concentrate on the creation process in a way that I might not have had I just used my phone.
As I set about collecting material for these prompts I struggled with PERFORMANCE, especially because I felt that the other three prompts dovetailed into each other quite well. I decided to focus on PRESENCE instead as a counterpoint to TRANSCENDENCE, which also made a clear connection to ROUTINE and ATTENTION and it was at this point that the process really began for me.
The process of collecting the rushes was the most difficult as I scoured the home space artefacts that would give a different interpretation of each prompt. PRESENCE was immediately inspiring as I was curious to see how I could find presence in a space without or with very little human presence. Here I found myself drawn to the trace of human presence, generally there was a sense of someone having been there prior to the shot being taken. The main exception I found was the footage of the leaf turning in the wind which to me had a ghostly elegance to it. In future pursuits of the idea of presence I’ll challenge myself to finding various types of presence in usually inanimate objects or structures, thinking beyond the ways that humans can leave an imprint.
For ATTENTION, ROUTINE and TRANSCENDENCE, I wanted to find ways of framing everyday activities that detached them from our usual understanding in some way so that they could stand alone as events. I was pleased with the way that the footage of the TV turned out as filming at that distance from the TV gave the fast-cutting content a dreamlike feel, and shooting the garage door mechanism from underneath made me realise how much more familiar I am with the sound it makes than the visual mechanics.
My favourite part of the process was editing as I was able to quite randomly throw a lot of the sounds into the sequence and have really compelling results. Before I began the assignment I was more drawn to the idea of very deliberately composing a soundscape, but the freedom of having a random order gave new life to both the clips and the sounds as they coalesced and emphasised certain aspects of each other. I found that changing the PERFORMANCE prompt to PRESENCE in the beginning of the process meant that all of the prompts felt connected enough that I was confident in being able to throw these sounds at the video content and find all of the pieces interacting in dynamic ways.
See below hyperlink to progress post: