In 200 words or less please outline your goals, desires – what you want to get out of this semester. You will review this later in the course. Many will rethink this dramatically by the end of the course – this is a good thing.

After Film-TV 1, I feel like I’m well equipped to handle Film-TV 2, and get even deeper into filming. Having that grounding, I feel like we can get really into the documentary. I quite enjoy documentaries, especially the more abstract and playful ones, and I feel that I could make a really great documentary in this course. I’d like to make an engaging documentary that we could possibly enter in a film festival!

In this week’s lecture, scenes from Scott Ruo’s ‘Four Images’, Brian Hill’s ‘Drinking for England’ and Chantal Akerman’s ‘D’Est’ were screened. Choose one of these, and consider, in a single paragraph, what might have intrigued, interested, displeased or repelled you.

I found the scenes from Scott Ruo’s ‘Four Images’ horribly scarring but also fascinating. It’s probably because I don’t eat meat because seeing animals being cut into makes me think of people being cut into. Even so, it was really effective at creating a certain atmosphere and showing how abstract and artsy documentary can be.

Listen to the first 10 minutes of Glenn Gould’s radio documentary, “The Idea of North”. If possible, use headphones. Record your impressions in a paragraph or two.

This wasn’t what I expected at first, but I found it quite calming and also quite interesting, perhaps because of the woman’s voice and the volume. The interruption of the man and then more voices was something I liked – I found audio montage fascinating and a really great way of bringing many different textures together. While they did bring in some foley sound, I definitely felt like there should have been some sort of musical background – especially as thinking of snow and the north makes me think of silvery chimes or metallophone sounds.

I thought the announcer was pretty cool – his narration reminded me of Rod Serling’s narration in the Twilight Zone for some reason (I’m sure I’m the only one who thinks that, but I still think it’s cool!

Listen to the audio you recorded in Tute #1. Here. Write a paragraph or two about your recording from a technical and/or “poetic” perspective.

Consider:

What these sounds evoke for you. What associations they have.

Do any of your recordings suggest images? What might they be?

Do any of your recordings suggest the possibility of other recordings?

I couldn’t access or download my files for some reason, but I did listen back to several of them after recording. Michael did create some artificial sounds, which could be somewhat poetic in a way, but the really poetic ones were those that were accidental or natural. Many were quite human – a lift going off or someone banging on metal. One that I really liked was the sound of water bubbling in a fountain near the cafe on campus. By moving the microphone around the water, we got a lot of different varieties of water sounds. I feel like these could easily lead to more recordings.