Tupicoff’s work is internationally renowned and critically acclaimed. His works include practices such as combining archived elements of reality with creations of animation. Such as his combination of of radio audio and animation for his film His Mother’s Voice (1998), studying in what may be considered an age of appropriation, with the advent of YouTube, Torrents, and Streaming, and with an interest in film makers like Adam Curtis who rely strongly on archival footage combined with new elements, and a background in graphic design, animation and illustration, I can tell from the introductory remarks I’m going to enjoy this reading.

The reading moves into the now familiar documentary discourse of capturing reality, discussing the concept of actuality in film production as ‘shooting uncontrolled action’. His Mother’s Voice, combines audio actuality with controlled vision. (A section of this film can be seen in the YouTube Video above) It repeats the audio once, and pairs it with different images to explore the emotions and grief in the real audio, illustrating what was being said, but then a second run explores Kathy’s house, what is happening around her, the setting she’s in giving the interview, if she was filmed in a traditional documentary’s talking head sense the camera would suddenly depart it’s fixed gaze on the subject and explore and probe their background while they continued to give the interview.

Tupicoff says in the Interview transcript in this reading that he was drawn to the power of the storytelling, that as stand alone audio it was already very powerful and poignant, and moved people in a way he wanted to move audiences, and it moved him to picture what was being said when he first heard it, but that it took him months to devise the idea of adding a second run of audio, and that before he’d settled on that illustrative perspective and the second real-time approach it was not worth making the film. I don’t think I really considered deviating too widely from the illustrative approach in my production, though I had wanted to extrapolate more meaning than the audio samples and the images alone would give by their pairings and order, and this in my mind relates closely to Tupicoff’s assertion that he wanted to get to the subtext of the interview, he didn’t set out to make a weird experimental documentary, and I didn’t want to do that with my piece either, he wanted to get to the metadata, the when and where the story is told from and what it’s really about below the surface, a recurrent theme in all the Snowden audio was him opening answers with ‘It’s not about x, it’s actually about y’ and many of these were what I found to be very wise observations and very succinct.

Although the story is real and unscripted, it was told 10 days after the incident and so it had been told many times before and it had developed a pattern and rhythm. I had read this interview before creating my final media piece, but I write this blog post on it after the fact, and which the Edward Snowden interview I used was not emotionally as stirring as a Mother telling the tale of losing her child, I see similarities, in that his arguments were in a manner tried and tested, developed and his pattern of speaking had adapted to a rhythm that sold a good story, which juxtaposed well against Mr Abbott, a man who is known widely for political gaffes and having his foot lodged in his mouth between long “errrr” and “uuuhhh” sounds.
Tupicoff says he noticed Kathyn’s rhythm when lipsyncing animation, I noticed a distinct rhythm when cutting the digital audio.

I set out initially to create content that told the story of a complex and abstract idea which I think is of vital importance relating to where we’re at politically in the world right now, I recorded audio and conducted interviews and captured the audio actuality I thought I needed, but I abandoned that for a different piece which appropriated an existing piece of actuality that already had an natural storyteller piece delivering it in one form, and I was able to add to it with additional visual content to try to get at the heart of the matter. A process which I saw a number of parallels within, when revisiting this reading.

I initially wanted to tell a factual story, that was fact driven, fact based, developed in a logical progression, and conformed to easily digested familiar structural forms, and I really had no interest in ‘fluffing around’ with some abstract arty experimental documentary, it -oddly for someone with a creative background- just did not appeal to me at all in the process of presenting actuality, which is something else that had stuck with me from the Tupicoff interview, also as an animator he was more interested in reality that fantasy. Viewing some of the other student’s pieces, of which many were poetic non-linear experiments, around the time I initially read the Tupicoff reading actually, definitely threw a spanner in my works, not one to want to follow the crowd I still got a clear impression from these screenings, and the virtual slap in the face to Nichols’ Expository Mode delivered by the fellow student derived short description of the Media 3 studio which was read out in class, that all submissions were expected to try to deviate from any norms. Rather than creatively use common techniques and tools to produce a documentary with a political nature that conformed to all the technical restraints of the brief and to, for all intents and purposes, unproblematic established conventions of documentary, we were to my dismay expected to make as Tupicott calls it a “weird experimental documentary”. This in mind I hit reset on my plans and spent a good 2 weeks without an idea before revisiting the Snowden audio.

I can’t say that this reading really influenced or shaped my piece or process, but I at least on some level drew parallels with some of the ideas in it.