Monday 16th October: The Walkabout (Task 1)

Creative Project Development and Realisation - Task 1

Me again! I'm back, interestingly just after the first post, I wonder what's up with that? This time however, I'll be talking about the very first task I was given in the CPDR module! Plus if you read all the way through, I might even post the finished video! That'd be cool!

What'cha do then?

The task was a pretty simple one! Each of us were separated off into pairs, and told to delegate one person to recording sound, and the other to recording video. We would then choose a starting location, and proceed to walk in opposite directions for exactly 15 minutes! We would then stop wherever we ended up, and record our delegated medium in our newly destiny-delegated location!

I paired up with some dude called Ryan! He was great fun and we immediately wrote down several ideas for what to record! One of those options we listed was just asking people to make weird sounds! So it was a good list. And that option would have been completely viable if not for what happened in:

The actual task!

Ryan and I decided the place we'd meet would be just up by park hill behind the train station! It'd be an excellent starting place due to the history of the flats up there! In case you don't know, there's a piece of graffiti on a bridge between the flats that has quite a bit of history behind it! I did take a picture as I walked past, but you could barely see it! So here's one from Google Images:

There are quite a few student documentaries about this particular piece, so information is not too hard to find!

So we arrived, and I had a good feeling about this task! It was about to go well! I know Ryan looked confident!

Nothing but confidence

We set our timers, and the task began! I took a rather winding route which... actually I'll just show you:

We started in the far right hand circle, and I made my way along the red line to the far left hand side! Ryan went... well, in the opposite direction! Now the area I ended up in is quite hard to see, but it's actually directly next to a few houses, on a hill overlooking the city. Just next to a generator! Which was great! Easy sound recording! So, I got to work.

Once I'd finished recording anything I could find, I headed back, met up with Ryan again, and we got to work transferring all the footage over! And for your viewing pleasure, the finished product can be seen at the bottom of this post!

Due to the massive amounts of litter in the footage, we decided to go for a theme reminiscing on the extent to which earth has been covered in humanity. Concrete roads, buildings and litter, all smothering what used to be natural landscapes. The question we've then got to ask is; are we letting enough of the environment to the surface?

Also it was super weird and fun to edit.

So the task was done, the journey was complete! But, did I learn things from this? I'd say so! The place I ended up was empty, just a few trees, some grass, one generator locked inside a building, and yet I was able to get enough material to create a soundscape like that! And not only did we take random sounds and footage and make something out of it, we made something with meaning. We applied purpose to what we'd recorded and conveyed a message through it. It's really quite interesting how people can interpret these things as a message, even when we ourselves weren't sure what we were creating during the filming process. Overall, fun experience! Thanks for reading! Enjoy the film!

And here's a Vimeo version just in case YouTube gets weird!

Smother Earth from Cameron Hunter-Spokes on Vimeo.

And the links to both of those in case Blogger gets touchy:

https://youtu.be/I8lsAJS65i4
https://vimeo.com/238311302

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Cameron