Here is my blog post for the storyboard assignment: 图像
Memory Soundscape
The memory came from last semester when I went to an exhibition on a piece of lawn. It’s a weekday, for I don’t like crowds. On that spot there were some old people strolling and talking, some kids accompanied by the olds playing and laughing, some students, I think are university students like me, going around the exhibition and so on. It was lunchtime, suddenly many office workers came out from buildings nearby. I walked around and saw more of them still staying at the office. I suddenly thought about life. We are first kids, then youth, middle age, and finally old. I want to convey the change of time to my audiences by representing some characteristics of different life stages. So, I chose the kids playing and teens laughing for the main sound in the first part representing youth, writing and hitting keyboards for the main sound in the second part representing middle age, testing blood pressure and sighing for the main sound representing old age.
(the cute dog at the exhibition, which also the inspiration for me to add barking to my audio)
I used many sound excerpts in this project. I used dog barking, the child playing, teens laughing to represent the lives of youth. For the life of middle age, there are writing, hitting the keyboard and finally can’t endure the dull life, workers dropped the pen and get up in anger. For the life of old age, I used the sound of a sphygmomanometer, the sound of heart jumping, and used the sound of a rusty metal plate to represent the aged joint and skeleton. If I only have these three parts, it seems isn’t coherent, so I added transitions between each part. It is a mix of knocking the doors and turning the book pages, both represent leaving the original space and moving on to a new one. The main recording is done with the external mic and Tascam. During the recording, I tried different distances, different volumes and tried to create a variation of the same sound. One problem I encountered is that for the old age part, I think it would be better to have a sound of high blood pressure rather than a normal blood pressure, so I let my friend go for running and took his blood pressure immediately after he finished running, however, the pressure is still lower than the limit, so I decided to use the normal blood pressure and vague the broadcast. Another problem is in editing. When I finished the first edition, the layer of the audio is not abundant and I need to add some very soft background music. I tried to record, but all the audios are hard for me to process some tantalizing bgm. At last, I chose an excerpt from one of my recordings and processed it to create a sound-like murmur. I think my editing process can be described as smoothly, I can use pieces I created in the previous assignments and recompose them to the final project.
If I have more time, I will first improve the old-age sound, for I am not quite satisfied with the sound of sphygmomanometer, I want to find a more specific example. Another thing is that I want to try to record a better bgm, a sound that can linger around you consistently but still can’t interrupt your perceptions of the main sound. One feedback I received from my instructor is exactly to add more layers of audio, base on which I add some assistant sounds like heart jumping and sighing, and the most important one, background music. During the critique, the sounds are much lower than I expected and nearly half of the time is no sound (the voice of writing and hitting the keyboard is very low), this extremely affects the perception of the audience. One feedback I received after the class is that my composition is a very complete work, but some of the excerpts are a little bit abstract that the audience doesn’t know what I’m conveying.
(the screenshot of my final work)
Reading Notes: The Uncertainty of Documentarism
Steyerl means that the authenticity of documentaries has decreased, so people tend to have unbelief in them. The documentary is supposed to represent reality, but many uncertainties make it impossible to take everything under consideration. Nowadays, however, people can use this characteristic to change or even distort the truth, which is actually a way to convey their expressions. When it comes to the relationship between fiction and truth, I think the truth is the foundation of fiction while fiction is an artistic expression form of truth. Fictions are composed on the basis of truths, after processing, the truth becomes an attractive fiction, which is a kind of expression of how the processing part is in filmmakers’ opinion. When people are attracted by fiction, they are more willing to read the prototype of the story, which is the truth, and then make the truth more known.
The authenticity and representation of the truth in media are decisive for me. I’m not a person who reads lots of news, but the platforms I read the news on are all big platforms. If I read some fake news about, for example, COVID-19, I will lose faith in this platform because it teases us. If I still read through this platform, I will become a puppet of this platform, think about what they want me to think, do what they want me to do. The live broadcast is a relatively authentic manner for its objective and real-time. It conveys the things that happen just now and no huge editing is made. Maybe this is one medium that is mostly closed to the truth.