Reflection #1 Brydan Meredith s3547569
When trying to decide on a place to document, my mind became instantly set on describing a place that would be easy for listeners to identify; hence I chose a lift. The lift has always been a place where sound takes precedence over vision, with our eyes we see a simple, large, boring door. Our ears however are exposed to so much more. Sound always indicates something eerily post-modern about lifts, with the loud neon buttons, the calm, robotic voice and the quick, pitchless crescendo of the giant carriage being tugged up an invisible wire. Lifts are a perfect symbol of the overly computerised world we live in-and it was this that I wanted to convey.
The way my partner and I approached this was to simply walk in the lift and move/position the microphone towards whatever button or voice over would play next. Interestingly as people entered into the lift there was dead silence and a complete lull, until one loud student decided to strike up conversation with me. ‘Are you guys recording now?’ he sharply said. I replied hesitantly ‘Yes, I umm- I’m doing Film 3’ ‘I’m going to swear into this thing’ exclaimed the young man. And so he did.
The purpose of me describing this incident is because, the moment my partner and I walked into the lift, we could never say we were honestly documenting the location of the lift-we instantly became an extraneous variable and instead documented the nature of a lift with an audio crew within it, which is in stark contrast to the standard environment of a lift. It also blurs the line between Fiction and Non-Fiction, was the student being more sanguine because he was on tape? I doubt he would act the way he did if I was not holding a huge microphone near him. Is the fact that he was more sanguine good for the purposes of entertainment? Most consumers don’t want to watch everyday life; they want to see eccentric behaviour-things a bit beyond the ordinary. And the last question I should ponder ‘Is that a fair trade?’ To elaborate Is it worth trading pure observation and truth for, as I said previously more ‘eccentric behaviour’? In the film, its title escapes me, maybe it was ‘Far From East’? We saw the subjects/actors behave very naturally, performing standard tasks not out of the blue yet they were camera conscious ever so slightly manipulating their behaviour albeit unintentionally due to the presence of camera.
In terms of an approach, due to the open nature of the task, and the fact that me and my partner were both new to the equipment I would not have approached it any other way. However, If I was to approach this task whilst shooting a drama film I would ask the people in the lift to be quiet, so the sound file is filled with beeps and robotic voices overs. If I was shooting a documentary I would hold onto a smaller recorder and record the environment in the lift that way.