My recordings are so, so bad. I mean, it’s hard to do bad recordings with the H4N, it’s a beautiful device that provides audio where all the sounds manage to be distinct and crisp, I love it. Yet, mine are quite awful. In an attempt to push the blame off myself (perhaps in vain), I was in a ‘group’ by myself, and being a horrifically awkward and shy person, I opted not to ask anybody for help and ended up not asking for any help making any sounds.

Most of mine have issues with background noise, there isn’t one that manages to be simply one, solo sound with no (or easily removable) noise. It’s all low signal-to-noise ratio stuff, which is most annoying but entirely my fault.

I am happy with a few, including the recording of the hydraulics, the sound of the door creaking loudly open and the sound of the Walk/Do Not Walk beeps (both the Walk and Do Not Walk sounds). It’s interesting that these are also the loudest of the sounds I captured, providing the obvious explanation for the swing in signal-to-noise. Audio is clearly not my thing, unfortunately.

For me, I love isolated, decontextualised sounds. This probably leads to my preference for the louder of the recordings, which all manage to clearly present themselves as what they are: pedestrian crossings, machinery in action and doors. It’s hard to tear them from their sources, they’re so distinctive, especially the sounds of the pedestrian crossing. For the door, yes, the natural assumption would be a door but there could be other sources of such loud creaking. The hydraulics are different, as they could belong to anything hydraulic, really. I guess I like that sound a lot because of that, as the image evoked isn’t just one of the truck that it was recorded from, but from anything hydraulic. The EWP in the studio. Disabled taxis. Heavy, lifting machinery, things that weigh a couple of tonnes and are designed to lift other things that weigh a couple of tonnes. Strength, technology. Maybe I’m thinking too hard about it?

‘The Idea of North’ is confusing, yet boring. I understand its intention – at least the intention I see from the opening ten minutes – in that is presents tales and experiences of the North in a decidedly second-hand way. This method of relaying information fits the format of radio perfectly, as the lack of a visual heightens the sense that this is, in a sense, storytelling.

The documentary opens with a recollection of a trip to the far north of Canada, before multiple other opinions and experiences of the arctic and sub-arctic start being played over the top, layered in a muddled mess that seemed like a complete waste of three minutes. I picture the frozen north as barren and bare, why are we filling this with so many voices that I can’t string together sentences from what I’m hearing? It bothered me, and it made me uncomfortable, and not in a nice way. It frustrated me. I noticed the rising and lowing volumes of the audio tracks, bringing different voices to the forefront then letting them drop away. This would have been great with another topic, or if the little bits of audio were interesting or related, but ultimately it annoyed me.

Following that, ‘The Idea of North’ became a standard exploration of what the North means to people, different people, in different contexts, which I’d normally love but I just didn’t relate to anything that was being said or how it was edited together.

Some scenes from documentary ‘D’Est’ were screened during the lecture this week, and of all the extracts it was the one that intrigued me the most. The major reason for that is its simplicity – it appeared to be a slowly tracking one shot, showing people in Eastern Europe around the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s historically fascinating, and I’m always someone who loves to see candid snapshots of humanity, especially humanity with a different social or political context. The premise is genius, and it’s amazingly not boring. I’m eager to watch more, as well as explore other simplistic but uncommon premises.

After studying True Lies last semester my concept and understanding of the documentary film has been completely changed, and I’ve found a new appreciation for the genre that I certainly didn’t have before. In this subject I am really eager to bring some of these new ideas to the process, and hopefully create something that differs greatly from the documentary-style films we made in Broadcast Media. I feel that coming into this semester I’m a lot more motivated than I was in Film/TV 1, and so I can hopefully push myself to be a lot more involved in the creative process, as this time I want to have a lot more input than I did with ‘Cursed’.

Ultimately, documentary film is my biggest weakness, but it fascinates me and there’s really so much there that can’t be explored in factual film, unless you start going into experimental film and I really have problems with overly experimental film because it really freaks me out but that’s irrelevant. I sincerely hope that this semester can broaden my knowledge of how documentary can be constructed, as well as improve my filmmaking skills. I haven’t really decided what role I want to have in the process, but something creative would be great this time.