Author: Sidney Akhurst

Dan Shepherd Lecture Notes

Sidney Akhurst / / Uncategorized

Feature Programs

Australia program.

 

Features: Documentary. Journalistic led… Wider spectrum of subject matters. Explore and idea. You can explore more etc with a feature, as opposed to a documentary.

 

Shade, color, depth.

 

Level crossing moving past acts as a transition in the sequence. Library sound effects. Features can use.

 

Archive material. At the disposal of a feature producer

 

There is a woman that is a poet that has her poetry read throughout the program (about trains)

 

Presenter led

 

Montage: no presenter, a collection of voices put together and music, cleverly to get a message across to the listener

 

Having a presenter can ‘get in the way’ when showing an idea like the Australia program. It demanded a montage format.

 

Appeal for making features: Go into a subject in depth, explore the nuances. More grey other than black and white. A lot of air time to fill. Depth. Gives you scope to explore a subject in any way you want.

 

Studio based discussion VS Feature radio. Feature transports you to another place. Different mindset produced. You can imagine being in the place. The most visual of all media. Encourages you to create the images in your mind.

 

Big appeal: More than the sum of its constituent parts.

 

More than the sum of (Take the program and be able to interpret it on a number of different levels)

 

At the time, there was very little said about Australia. Fascinating country that much of the outside world didn’t know much about

 

Debate at the time about immigration at the time, causing a lot of right wing unrest,

 

Becoming a multicultural society.. Land rights etc legal case about a claim to native Australians land (mineral rich north)

 

 

Bit in the end of the program about immigration, history of railway.

 

ABC (Equivalent to the BBC in Australia). No mobile phones in them days really.

 

Do research, talk to people, read up on it. Then have to do logistics to work out costs.

 

Train to Perth. Looks really hot and a load of desert. Etc., people weren’t really giving out much information so producer had to rethink his plan about how to get stuff down.

 

Doing a lot of interviews. 30 hours of material to get through.

 

Planning research, recording, mixing, admin at the end. All down to 1 person.

 

Next stage is the editing and mixing. Creative part is the hardest bit but most satisfying.

 

Making a sculpture is similar.

 

22/23 minutes of voices In the end and the rest is music and sfx

 

Walking around with lots of tape in rucksack. Book studio with studio managers. Studio manager makes all levels right and all the edits super smooth

 

Do the final mix themselves… Deliver it to a manager at BBC for broadcast

 

At BBC, you book a studio and you have time restrictions. Editing and mixing stage. Lots of different parts all glued together.

 

Producer that can hear it in their head.

 

Interviews: Omnidirectional microphone

 

Sound of train etc , use a stereo Mic

 

You have to keep yourself out of mind, and keep the listener in mind.

 

BBC own all rights in perpetuity.

 

 

Research On Death & NDE’s

Sidney Akhurst / / Uncategorized

I will chose Elements from different sources that will be most relevant to our projects main concept, which is about Death itself, as opposed to both life after death and

 

Death and Dying “ A reader” (Sarah Earle, Carole Komaromy and Caroline Bartholomew- 2009)

 

Understanding Death (Introduction) Carol Komaromy)

 

The Author talks about death in terms of a children’s viewpoint. Of what death is. They see someone that’s alive as being full of motion, where as a dead person is a motionless still person with no “signs” of life.

 

Komaromy talks about how the dead body is then put in to a coffin and more becomes a symbol of death itself rather than showing actual death, in the way that humans will make ceremonies and rituals that are metaphorically engaging to show death and not in a literal manner.

 

Near Death Experiences

 

Near Death experiences occur usually when accidents happen, and the experient is pronounced dead, but then miraculously is revived. All accounts of this happening are documented by the NDERF (The near death experience research foundation)

 

These sites accounts of the experiences are very diverse, even in an artistic way, if not true, then very encapsulating. These ideas, such as the process of time being a distortion of reality, we used in our project by distorting time with the audio. (Ie Fast & Slow & Superfast / Reverse) .

Bryan Rudd Lecture-

Sidney Akhurst / / Lectures

Bryan Rudds Lecture today was about his past experience working to create a 5 part Radio drama called the Chronicles of Freedom.

This was a Drama that was made specifically about William Wilberforce, to highlight and celebrate his work in the Abolishment of Slavery in the UK. Wilberforce was from Hull orignially, the same city as Bryan, so the two really went hand in hand on the production of the show.

Bryan specifically talked about what was important when producing a show. His role as the sound engineer meant that he had to take control of the team assembling the program, aswell as sort everything out with the logistics, sets, sounds and permissions for the uses of certain sounds and sets. The most critical thing at the starting point for Bryan was asking questions, to finalise what was actually happening. He gave the example of the production budget being a certain amount, but the group needed the permission from Hull City Council, to use a particular place for a set. Hull said it was ok etc, but asked for £1400 to be able to use it. This was way above budget for the radio Drama, which would only use that particular place in a few scenes.

Instead, Bryan chose the wall opposite Ann Summers just off Lincoln High street by the Gate. Ironically, the people of Hull werent very happy about this. The old door was used for the recording of William talking to the Minister/ Vicar.

 

TBC.

Lol Hammond Lecture 5th October 2015

Sidney Akhurst / / Lectures

Lol Hammond is a music supervisor, Currently working for Vertigo Films, that is based in London. He selects music from Composers and also gets tracks from bands in the music industry. Lol talked about the importance of the relationship between the Director and the Music supervisor when it comes to Film production. The Director is different for every film, and it will depend massively on the film as to how close the relationships are. For example, Lol described the Directors of some films to be there at every moment being involved with all of the musical decisions taking place. In other films they would take more of a back seat and let the Music Team just “get on with it” .

 

Lol then went on to communicate the ways in which Films get music tracks from outside music industries. Most Artists in the current industry are making music which is oned by Universal, Warner or Sony (The big 3 Record companies of the industry) and so negotiaiting deals with them to get the music on the films can get quite expensive. Although this is true, most films have a large budget for music, and Lol describes how some films can have up to a £2M budget for music. Essentially, the music Supervisor can get for a cheaper price, a Composer, than getting official tracks licensed. On avergae, Lol stated that a tune will cost from about £1000 to £2500 for the track itself and then a further 1 or 2.5 Thousand for the PRS Licensing, so All in, about £4000-5000. In the film “the Football Factory” which Lol was involved with, he had spoken to Paul Weller, whom owned the rights to the song “Going Underground”. Together they negotiated the price of the song in the film and got a good deal with it (He didnt specify the exact price). The prices themselves are split between the record companies and the publishers of the tracks.

 

In terms of Composers, the Music Supervisor would negotiate the terms and rights with them to find a suitable agreement for use of exclusive orignial music for the film. The director can quite possibly be heavily involved in work with composers too. Lol Talked about times where the Director was making the”wrong” musical decisions and times where he didnt agree with the directors choices. Of Course though, he stated that you would have to calm that kind of opinion down , when it comes to such a disagreement, in that he didnt want to “Piss the director off and get the sack”.

 

Lol spoke about the way in which Artists would want to know about the scenes their music would be played on. For example , some of the scenes in his films get quite violent and horrific (Murder scenes, rape scenes etc) so artists would have to really know about what the scenes are before they gave the film team rights to the music. Of course, Muisc supervisors would try and water it down because they wouldnt want to lose a potential really good music track that would fit the scene perfectly (which has happened before to Lol)

 

For me, this lecture was very helpful, in that it showed a little more of the actual Role of a Music Supervisor and how personal relationships can be so important in striving towards success in the films. This was a very interesting lecture because it had revealed parts of the way the film industry and directors work with music supervisors and on a personal level. His history of being a DJ too, was interesting and it quite reminded me of how my own sets of interests can relate to beimg in a film

First Ideas and Proposal presentation

Sidney Akhurst / / first ideas

For our first set of ideas, Charlotte Mellor and I talked about doing soundscapes and/ or sound art for the audio representation of brain waves and different emotions from the brain. After much discussion and debating , we discovered the difficulty in representing and recreating something that we may not have actually experienced. Charlotte and I met in the Library and began to discuss ideas, and upon thinking up the darkest ideas , we subsequently came up with the idea that the experience of death would be a viable situation to recreate in an audio-visual manner. After having spoken to Jane Hearst on the phone on the same day, we found that she had agreed to provide the visual back up to our audio. The actual idea is that we will have pictures and sounds together, of the experience of someone dying through their eyes.

 

For our proposal presentation, we both will discuss our ideas that we will be using in the media artefact, the gantt chart as to how we will progress with the production of the media and a storyboard, to show how we plan to create the media in a chronological.