Sound and Image

The way the soundtrack worked in Something More was essentially a choice of music to listen to. After a short spoken intro to the piece, explaining what to expect, health & safety etc. , the walker seleted music from a choice of 3. They could reselect immediately, so hopefully noone would get 'stuck' listening to something they really didn't fancy. The music was the soundtrack to their walk, and then became the soundtrack to their film as they watched it.

It worked well, so I'm using that format for e-merge, but with more variation in the styles.
Following BEV's theme of celebrating women as makers, I invited 3 women musician/composers to contribute music for the mediascape: Sophia Loizou with Kukicha, Jane Harwood and Sarah Mosses.

The brief is for approx 15 minutes, in some way relevent and suitable for St James' Park, for a public audience includng families. The music needs to work without images as well as with images, and expect to work with images in an unexpected/unpredictable way! The film could start (and end) at any point within the soundtrack, and continue for any duration - so the 15 minute piece needs to work as a loop also. It will be played through headphones, which could be open (ie. letting in surrounding sounds), closed (blocking out the outside sounds) or anything people may bring with them...
Challenging? Unusual? Innovative? Exciting!

All three women have been fantastic and responded by creating or adapting music especially for the project, working collaboratively with others to compose, play and record some wonderfully visual sounds. Thankyou girls!

I'm really delighted with the music, and can't wait to try it out with a few test images actually in the park...

There will be more about the musicians shortly. Meanwhile, the music will also impact on the video editing and photo-composition.

With Something More I tried to find a new way of combining images, thinking about the attributes of locative media, gps, and how that is very different to TV, cinema etc. Using a different relationship to space, perception and time to try and build a short film that could have been made by a locative medium.
The Bath international music festival celebrated it's 60th birthday last year and as part of that a 60 second challenge was launched, for film-makers to use music available through the festival, and create short film celebrating music, 60 or the area.
'Whitesheet: 6 walks' was my response.
Tom Ellis' piece Magnetic Spheres was not what I would have previously imagined as music for Whitesheet, but when I heard it had a similar quality of energy as the landscape, totally loved it, and knew it just had to be the soundtrack! So that was the structure to combine photos and video from 6 walks on Whitesheet into an experimental short film.

Having heard the music submitted for e-merge, I'm putting my previous ideas about image compilation on one side, and going to try out 3 short films led by pure response to the sound (in the context of the park/images gathered), and see what happens... could be a total sidetrack not to be used, or could lead into something interesting for the mediascape... we'll see what emerges!