So… I’m nearly there! For my final edit, I am really continuing to focus on absolutely nailing the ending. I think it is easily the most important part of the piece, and I’ve really trimmed down the fat from the rest of the piece to be able to double the ending in length.
I want to add a bunch more strange audio clips I’ve got saved on my computer as well. Some stuff I just recorded around the train station will help to disrupt the audience’s concentration and create that sense of confusion I am going for.
A reading from several weeks ago by Peter Cusack (edited by Angus Carlyle and Cathy Lane) helped me to reflect upon the audio in my piece over the last day or so. It argues that field recordings give a great feeling of “spatiality, atmosphere and timing”. This is really important for my piece, because in order to get the reaction out of the audience that I am aiming to achieve, I need to not only disrupt the visual elements of the piece, I need to completely tear down that feeling of spatial and atmospheric uniformity that the recordings have conveyed throughout the piece. The scenery has a calm, tranquil atmosphere and spatially places the audience in that area, distant from any civilization. The train clips rip the audience away from those areas, but the audio still provides an atmospheric and spatial relationship. Those clips place the audience right beside a train. So in order to break that I need to make the audio throughout the end of the piece much less discernible, and much more complex. This will help to completely drop all of that away and leave the audience completely bereft of anything to notice other than the entire collapse of the film itself, and leave them confused and their attention completely disrupted.
Reference
Cusack, P., 2013. On Listening. Devon: UniformBooks