Feeling For Sound- Matthew Herbert

Moving on from graphical scores, I have come back round to an artist I already know and admire, Matthew Herbert. He's well known for his album 'One Pig' which explores the life of a pig from birth to plate, and much of his work focuses on attacks on the food industry, health and the problems we face in the UK with regards to that.

When looking at graphical scores I saw alot of potential there, but also see it as quite random. I also then looking at my project so far, saw it as too broad. I've decided that instead of trying to tackle multiple points in my life which changed me greatly, I'm going to focus on the one. The divorce of my parents, as it's the one that I feel changed me most in terms of my direction, my focus and my attitudes in life. It's also the one I remember most vividly. That period of my life spans a good year or so while I coped with that as well as doing my GCSE's and such.

Back to Matthew Herbert. I really admire how he incorporates foley into his music and tries to say something, or tell a story with that. I would prefer to do something like that, whilst still keeping with the binaural beats and other devices to make the audience feel emotion directly, more scientifically through sound as well as have emotion inferred through music.

Here is some of Matthew Herbert's work which gives an idea of the work I am trying to make:

I feel as if this approach will help my piece remain more focused in terms of message, and also help tell a story as it is much more easily structured, especially if I try to stick to the general rules of thumb when it comes to constructing music.

Shooting!

The shoot has come and gone! It's really weird to think that you spend all that time preparing for something, and it's gone in a flash! I think everyone is exhausted now though, and rightly so. It's been a really intense and rough few days.

I think the shooting in general went well, we got everything shot that we wanted and more. I loved working with the actors, they were very friendly and down to earth and seemed to understand what I was saying to them and wanted them to do. I still think reading those books on directing helped immensely and I really believe my confidence has grown because of doing this shoot too. The shots we got were fantastic, and I really appreciated having a good camera and lighting team with me, Tom and Shahid, who I worked with last year on Parallel. We understand each other quite well and share the passion for what we do that I really love.

There were some issues on set, mainly surrounding timing and communication. We were behind every day for one reason or another, but particularly Wednesday because we shot the masters on that day and it took alot longer than expected. However, we finished with time to get out and on the last day we finished early and had time for behind the scenes interviews and such. However, I think we could have expressed our frustrations on set a bit more. Not infront of the actors obviously, as we never would have anyway, but I think when tensions became a bit high I think we could have benefited for stepping to one side for a moment to voice concerns quietly. However, following the shoot we all sat down and spoke about any issues we had so that going into post-production we had clear air to work with.

I think this shoot and set build have taught me alot about the production process, how long things take, the needs of actors and crew and just the way things work. This is the first time I've been on the set of a 'traditional' narrative based film, and certainly the first time I've directed actors. I realise now that I really much prefer being in post-production. Some people thrive on film sets and love the stressful situations it brings whereas I don't. I wasn't by any means miserable but I think it would be incredibly difficult for me to do that for a long period of time.

That being said, however, I did have fun and there were alot of great moments on set, with some really nice shots we got to go with it. Now I just can't wait to come back after Easter and get going on the edit and sound design!

Set Build

Our set building is complete! It's really scary to think that it was just a couple of months ago that we were writing the script for this film and now we are shooting it.

Building the set was really interesting, and a massive learning experience as well as being exhausting and time consuming to say the very least. We had very little time to put the set up for starters, just three days to do it and we ran into a few complications along the way. 

On the first day we put up all the walls and put down the floor. The floor, which was one bought in the studio by another group, was slanted where it had been cut for a slanted set at one point, which made it very difficult to fit to the shape of the set, so we had to build the set slightly differently in order to fit them in properly. It did not affect the amount of materials we needed, but it took a bit of time that we did not have. Towards the end of the day, we were rushing and I was pushing to get the walls wallpapered so that they would have time to dry overnight and we could paint them when we came in that morning.

The next morning, on set build day number 2, we started painting. I had to go over some bits of wallpaper with some more wallpaper paste just to set it a little bit on the edges, but in general I think everyone did a pretty good job. The main thing today was the feature wall. Laura had the idea of creating stencil just to print on the wall, however because we put the wallpaper on before we stenciled it, there wasn't enough pressure behind it to stencil it properly and they came out blotchy or patchy. In the end, we had to have some people go round making the stencils and people following them filling it in with paint. As you can imagine this took a really long time, and we didn't finish this until day three. I think it's safe to assume that everyone was exhausted by the end of day two.

On the last day, we got the wall done by the afternoon, which was good and I'm glad we got a massive chunk of it done during day two. The last day was mostly finishing off painting the rest of the walls and then putting all the decoration and props in. I had my housemate Jess come along to draw on the blackboard we had, which looked really nice! And which we later made a frame for. I was really impressed by how the set looked at this point and everyone who came in said it was looking really good. It was not how I imagined it, but both Laura and Shahid were happy with it and so was I.

During this last day, myself and Laura also had to organise some last minute things for the actors. James Winter, who was playing Pete had just told us he couldn't get a suit for himself so we had to rush and buy one, on top of this not long before we had also had the surprising organisational task and monetary issue of finding him a hotel to stay in as we weren't aware of his location in Peterborough. So it was safe to say we were already feeling the heat of the shoot and it wasn't even there yet!

By the end of the day, Tom and Shahid had started setting up the glide cam and we had got our kit from the stores ready for shooting the next day.