The excerpt from the documentary drinking for England confused and displeased me as I thought it was an odd and in my opinion ineffective method to document the subject, although I think my interpretation of it would have been quite different if I had watched the whole film. However as an excerpt the clip felt very average, the cinematography reminded me of some generic overused music video as did the singing. As a result of this I was for the most part distracted from the lyrical content but when I did tune in it also did not seem like anything new.
10 min doco
Intense, confusion, distraction, the north, landscape, peacefulness, soothing, Canada, atmospheric. These are the notes I took whilst listening to the recording, which is what seems to be a audio doco using 5 interviews to gather a series of personal experiences of a location (Northern Canada). The introduction was for me the most interesting section, although initially confusing as you adjusted to pick up audio bites and struggle to hang on to one person’s dialogue it became more intriguing but still hard to follow for any extended period of time. The start of the interviews was obviously associated with travel, which hinted that there might be a sound scape narrative that was running in conjunction independently with the dialogue from the interview.
I really only pulled off four good recordings, firstly the sound of my own footsteps, secondly the street/road sounds, thirdly café chatter/noise and lastly the sound of flowing water.
Footsteps was nothing special didn’t really evoke many emotions was more just technically to see what it would have sounded like to be moving and recording at the same time.
The street recordings was probably the most technical difficult recording to pull off as it took me a few tries of readjusting volume to allow for loud vehicles passing such as large trucks or trams.
The Café chatter worked well with the exception of a couple of audio spikes. The chatter is quite indistinguishable and evokes images of a busy environment.
This recording also evokes personal nostalgia as the background song playing in the café was one that I have heard a lot during my childhood.
The water recording is my favourite because it holds a very different atmospheric tone to my other recordings it feels as if it was not recorded in a city. It also evokes the usual feelings of peacefulness, tranquility and needing to go to the toilet.