This piece manifested itself in a very different way to anything I have worked on before. I would typically edit to an audio file, using the music to convey emotion and guide the listeners through the piece. Approaching the project in a different way allowed me to formulate a more engaging, participant driven story. I collated groups of audio files and established ‘scenes’ that would form the structure of my feature. I filtered through the content to find a ‘hook’ that would set the scene and allow me to understand how the piece might take shape.
A strong part of this piece I focused on is the preconceived ideas of what the people are like. “The more you know, the more you know you do not know” (Bolton 2009) The more I got to know Aleisha and how she came to be a resident of Atherton Gardens, the less I realised I knew about her. Any preconceived ideas of what people living here would be like and how they came to be living here soon faded. It was when she revealed to me that her mother had committed suicide on the estate, which must have been an extremely difficult and traumatic event, that I realized that the anonymity of radio provided each person I interviewed the opportunity to articulate their experiences, without the distraction of their visual representation.
In critiquing my piece, I feel I could have given more background on Atherton Gardens in the introduction and that the piece also lacked a climax. I didn’t want the piece to be heavily informational, as I wanted the listener to use their imagination to visualise the place from the voices and background sounds. I now see that this may have left the listener unclear in some areas. I also think that had I explored other recording devices, such as solid state recorders, radio microphones, hard-wire lapel microphones, boom poles, shotgun microphones and portable mixers, I may have ended up with a much richer sound production. I decided to work with the technology I knew.
Overall, I think the fact that I pushed myself out of my comfort zone made this project much more rewarding. It is easy to not explore sensitive issues and produce work that is an expression of what we feel comfortable with. I definitely I stayed away from this and will continue to do so in the future.