I’ve decided to do another reflection on the filmic potential for a recent observation I had, as almost immediately after it happened I was thinking about how I would film the essence of what I saw.

 

A light breeze washes over the few people leisurely sitting on the pier, waves crashing on the old wooden poles, the slight sound of hungry seagulls hovering in the distance. The warm and welcome April sun beams down onto the small collection of beach dwellers, hoping to soak up as much sunlight before winter rears its ugly head again. A group of young people crowd around a small speaker, looking on in anticipation while the sound of a radio announcer bellows from the overly loud speaker, although not loud enough that any of the beach goers would leave. As the radio announcer introduces an artist into the studio and they start performing, a young man picks up the speaker, turning it up even further, and yells to the mostly empty beach, “this is my mate!”. His look of genuine joy and excitement bringing a warm smile to the several people to the pier.

My immediate notes for this observation were;

. Following the path of the radio performer into different spaces, creating a world in each space with predominately sound and a strong visual presence that shows different spaces
. Have each new space feel utterly unique to the previous one, through tone both visually and sonically
. Potentially having the beach scene that the observation has but I don’t believe that to be an important factor, I’m much more interested in the path of the music being played through the radio

 

Travelling through entirely different places with the threaded tie of music via a radio is incredibly interesting, especially nowadays when the radio is not really where we get music from, and I want to show its ability to connect to different people and different places. Thematically I think this observation could be really strong visually, and would allow me to experiment with creating different spaces in a small amount of shots through different visual tones and a well contained, unique sound design, which would include how the music from the radio is heard in the spaces.

The song choice is also an important piece of this if I were to turn this observation into a video piece, and I’m certain I would start the video in the radio station with the musician. The song that played in the observation was a folksy song with just a male singer and a guitar and I think that would be a good thing to continue on into the video, as I think that’s a style of music that can be heard and interpreted in very different ways, where you can hear it in one context and feel a certain way and then hear it in another and get something completely new out of it, so I will endeavour to find a song that can evoke a multitude of feelings.