We’ve come out the other side of the worst of it. Jen and I (mostly Jen, let’s face it) filmed last week. Thanks to the miracle of Savers and an incredible historical home in Jen’s family (it truly felt like passing through a time warp at the front door, in the best possible way) we created a really beautiful historical piece – and managed to hide a modern powerpoint behind a box, so well done all round. Jen’s editing that and I have no doubt that it’s going to come out as a thing of beauty. It better, since I had to fiddle around with the cartilage piercings our actor had in his upper ear and it was pretty supremely gross.

As for me, I recorded my audio the day before and had mixed results. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll all come out well; I’m nearly through with editing and it’s made a big difference – but editing’s easy when your voice actor’s biggest problem is the huge pauses they take between sentences. The voice actor who filled the role of Emilie Christie was a pro and brought the warmth and joie de vivre I hoped she would. Also, it really interested me that most of the actors who were so so keen and enthusiastic and interested in our project never bothered to reply to the messages I left them. I know it’s not a paid job so it probably wasn’t a high priority to them, but I guess I’m just old-fashioned. I was leaving voicemails, after all.

The only major task I really have left is figuring out how to frame my audio. Something definitely needs to go underneath it, if only to combat the echo. I’m tossing up between a simple, classical piece of music and situational background audio – horse hooves clopping, city bustle, gunshots, “hey you!”s, etc. But… that might come off a little “Orson Welles presents… the War of the Worlds”. Both of these things are available at archive.org so legality isn’t a deciding factor. I suppose I’ll throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.

This time of year is a gentle nightmare of assessment and stress. I’m having nightmares in fractured Spanish. ¡Me encanta el frigorifico de mi perro! Not relevant and not pleasant.

That said, our JMC project is coming along well. We’ve had to readjust a lot of our more ambitious plans, which is a real shame but was always inevitable. In particular, the way the webisodes have been changed diminish some of the glamour of what we originally planned. But I think the parts that we will film on Friday give a sense of what we’re going for and will be wonderful. I really wish we had a bit of a budget for this subject. Thank god Brontae had that crepe hair lying round.

As you can see, I’m more than a bit scatterbrained at the moment. When am I not? But this time of semester tears my brain to shreds; I feel like all I do is wander off on tangents at the moment. At least my component of the project, the audio, is recording tomorrow. I can’t wait. The voice actress seems more than capable, the scripts are sound (ridiculous camp, but sound), I’m working with familiar equipment. It’s all straightforward. Brontae and Amy are kicking goals with the app and the website — I don’t really understand the technicalities of what they’re doing but it all looks great.

So, how am I feeling overall? Like a mess. Like a total mess. But in spite of that, we’re tracking at a really good pace and I feel extremely confident heading into our final full week before the project is due.

 

As much as I hate Americanisms, it’s a lot harder to shout “excursion” with enthusiasm. What I’m trying to say is that we went on one and this idiotic video captures some of it:

As part of our research, we went down as a group to investigate the JMC artefacts down at the Immigration Museum. The notorious sword/cane combo is the starring attraction, as well as some of the contraband (opium paraphernalia, scandalous books, non-European people, etc) that Christie worked tirelessly to excise from Australia.

The Immigration Museum strikes me as working very hard to be very apologetic about the thorough, legally mandated racism we continue to see to this day have thankfully gotten past (…). It was really important to see JMC in this context because it serves as a reminder of the kind of values he was upholding. One of the tests to determine if a person deserved to be granted Australian citizenship was proficiency in any European language — not English, but as long as it was European they were good to go. JMC was directly involved with this kind of testing, and I imagine he brought the same gusto to it that he did any of his other endeavours. As much fun as he seems on paper — as swashbuckling, rambunctious, all those wonderful words — he is not a hero. Australia in general wasn’t a very nice place to be at Federation. Even if you were rich and white and male, ticked every box, you still didn’t have goddamn air con.