Pre-production
The non-narrative way of thinking is not something I’d really considered before the commencement of this term. I had always been focused on the idea of telling a story. Now, I was faced with the somewhat daunting prospect of trying to tell a some sort of story, or at least make some sort of statement/point using a form of presentation I’d never tried.
What started as frustration soon turned into excitement though as we began to explore the non-narrative form. We were lucky enough to be exposed to a variety of non-narrative pieces through the term’s Wednesday screenings with Chris. And though some of the things we were shown were challenging to the point of frustration at the time (the famous work of John Cage, to name one), it is evident looking back at the term that simple exposure to the format has had an effect on the way we got to thinking about the film we were being expected to produce.
Two places we drew influence from were the works of Oskar Fischinger and Norman Mclaren. For me, these two artists opened up my creative mind to the idea of an abstract audiovisual communication. Fischinger’s experiments with visual music in the late forties (or, his ‘Early Abstractions’) ended up lending themselves directly to the theme of ‘rhythm’ that we would eventually focus on in our final piece. Whilst it would be very easy to lose yourself in the abstract, non-narrative world and produce something that is (and I quote my peers) a ‘mash-up’, Fischinger’s work was testament to honest correlation between what your viewer is seeing and what they are hearing. That correlation is something that we would come to consider crucial to the way we edited both our sound and our visuals.
Mclaren’s influence is also immediately evident in our film. In fact, there were ideas borrowed from his 1971 film ‘Synchromy’ that reveal themselves within the first minute of the piece as appearingly random falling drops of melted snow are married to a range of electronic beeps. While there is no defined or trackable rhythm (they are just drops of water falling from a roof after all), the brain cannot help but accept that there is some kind of consistency to it. As both the video and audio clips are looped, upon hearing it repeated, the unnatural rhythm it does possess is able to become familiar to the listener and therefore they may (or may not) be able to accept it as natural as the film progresses.
Initially, what we wanted to do was create a sort of freeform, split screen documentary of the seaside town of Wells-next-the-sea, concentrating our efforts on the themes of nature, industry and community. We set aside time in the Cavendish Building (C12) to indulge ourselves in a screening of Simon Pummells' 'Bodysong' (2003) that chronicled (through over an hour of archive footage) human life from birth to death, dialogueless, accompanied on by an original musical score from Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead.
While this particular film provided endless encouragement in terms of our understanding of the non-narrative form, strangely enough it was in the trailer that we discovered how we wanted to 'not tell' our 'story' through the use of split screen visual editing.
The trailer for 'Bodysong' highlights segments from the film in a progressive split screen form that advertises each chapter of the film from birth to death. Though only a few minutes long, the trailer features original musical accompaniment, and in many ways is a non-narrative piece all of it's own.
Production
We were much looking forward to filming in Wells as it is a true seaside town with a rich history and spectacular scenery. We had our three themes in mind had a structured game plan in terms of how and where we wanted to shoot. Unexpectedly, our day of shooting landed right in the middle of this winter's only real bout of snowfall. That particular occurrence along with the fact that we were shooting during the day in midweek made for an experience that took some adapting to.
Whereas we had originally planned to shoot with three separate mindsets, the snow and lack of people meant that we were faced with a cold, barren setting that immediately required rethinking. Abandonment soon became a familiar feeling, and our concentration soon turned to the lack communal sense in a town that had previously prided itself on providing an exciting family oriented atmosphere.
I'm sure that none of the Wells 'summer magic' has been lost in any way, shape, or form, but the winter non-wonderland that we encountered on our visit surprisingly enabled us to think about the social issues that we would eventually want to put across in our film.
The sense of community in this country used to be noteworthy. Neighbourhoods used to band together in response to the friendships of the children that inhabited it, and the town hall was the central hub of activity on most evenings and weekends. In recent years though, we have become a nation of conservative, overly political correct people who don't know the names of the people living next door to us. We keep to ourselves and concern ourselves more and more with paranoid privacy and financial security with each passing, cash-guzzling Christmas.
These thoughts, as political and opinionated as they may be, began to become a focal point for our shoot. We knew that what we were shooting was never going to tell a story, but as we garnered more and more footage, a point began to form. Rather than a narrative, we started to think about a statement of sorts that we would be able to convey through a strong communication between the visual and audio aspects of our production. Keeping only the visuals in mind, we proceeded to shoot in both 28mm and 50mm formats keeping in mind the themes of social neglect and disintegration. We explored every corner of the town which featured industrial hotspots, abandoned playgrounds, and points of natural beauty; the setting providing the visual canvas on which we were able to paint a cold, abstract picture that highlights how British values have evolved in the last 50 years.
Post production
Post-production was always where this film was going to find its shape. We had never planned to record live sound in Wells, as we always wanted to propose a modernistic, 21st century influenced sound design to compliment our traditional visual style. In an industry that (in music) is dominated by the same four, computer generated and vocoded chords, and (in film) post processed, trend-fucking 3D cash cows, we wanted to identify the current social state of the country (and how the country defines art) through a bold audiovisual communication. This was always going to be a tough ask, especially considering that the last thing we wanted to do was fall into the trap of 'messy pretensiousness'.
So the idea of a somewhat coherent rhythm returned to the forefront of our minds. We decided that we wanted to take sounds that were apparently random and unconnected and marry them to a visual progression that was both challenging and socially relevant.
We filmed a progressive tracking shot from a car window that documents Wells from the town centre, along the boardwalk until we finally made our way to the seafront that is (much like our theme) completely detached from the greasy spoon, stick of rock town centre. This journey is the basis of our film (the only one of ten sequences that doesn't loop) and signifies the distance between commercialism and natural tradition that we wanted to highlight.
With this snow-laden backdrop in place, nine individual clips begin to introduce themselves every 20 seconds once the film is underway. Once the 3x3 focal points were in place visually, we were able to start thinking about how the introduction of different sounds would sonically echo the ever changing visual progression of our film.
We originally challenged ourselves to make this film a performance piece. There would be nine sounds against a melodic drone background, all within the realms of live performance. What we wanted to do was select these individual sounds and then perform them in a foley environment in real time without any kind of loop. We thought that this would provide a natural sound design that would stand out over the course of 3-4 minutes. Upon realising the mechanics of our visual edit though, we once again began to consider our original ideas concerning rhythm, and (somewhat boldly, I suppose) decided that like the visual edit, we wanted to experiment with a kind of forced familiarity over a period of time.
What started as a base drone became an expansive sonic trial. We used this project as a chance to try things out as far as Soundtrack Pro was concerned. Having enjoyed success in our on location, live sound recordings for our narrative piece, we elected to do the exact opposite for our non narrative sound design. Purely for the sake of experimenting with a different practice altogether, the sound of 'Community Moderne: Values Flail' is comprised entirely of sounds provided by the Soundtrack Pro sound library. The simple reason for this is that there were so many kinds of sound that we wanted to manipulate and then include in our final piece. Many of these sounds could well have been recorded live, but there was a precise mechanical crispness to many of the used effects that I felt were synthetically important to realising the modernistic criticism that the film addresses.
The point of the film was always to lightly highlight the past while being cynical of the present, and the almost ironic use of pre-recorded sounds only poked fun at an entertainment industry that is making millions of dollars from recycled ideas and regurgitated riffing. Where we lacked in original recordings, I feel like we made up for in the way that our sounds were manipulated and then strategically placed within a stereo space to directly correspond with our visual edit.
The one thing that I am truly proud of with this film is the way in which we were able to shift visual and aural focus of the course of the film. Sounds are introduced with an immediate permanence. You will hear it for as long as you choose to before moving on to another sound, or another image. A minute later, you may find yourself dragged back to focusing on that same sound. That one individual sound will never have wavered or shifted, it will have remained constant. Whilst we are pleased with the final mix, we hope to have offered our listeners the chance to create their own 'mix' through our careful consideration of levelling and panning.
As this term concludes, I am pleased to have made a non-narrative film that I personally understand and feel capable of explaining to people who may ask me about it. It is a format that I was completely unfamiliar with only two months ago, but now feel confident in returning to.
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