Throughout this project, the communication between my sister and I has been constant, sharing experimental and draft work with each other. This has made for a much easier understanding of what the other aims to create, the atmosphere we want to provide and our purpose of the project. This kind of communication feels necessary in any collaboration in order to achieve a balanced work load and shared understanding, making the outcome much more cohesive.
So far, we have established that the visual animations will occur inside of a quilted frame that Mimi has made, naturall dyed and hand sewn (see below). This kind of boarder is quite traditional in quilting, and is a reoccurring element of Mimi’s work, therefore it felt representative of her art to have this main structural frame.
As well as textile work, Mimi’s art involves illustration, and so we both thought it would be nice for her to include the separate elements of her style and mediums in this project & overall series, consequently creating a work that represents her multidisciplinary approach. Below is an experimentation of using digital illustration (using an Ipad), layered on top of stop motion style moving image.
The draft story/ timeline that Mimi explained for the visuals is:
The orange circle in the hand turns into the sun shining down on the forrest, where we get glimpses of the Huldra – she’ll be travelling through the forrest whimsically, almost dance-like, and then she’ll descend into the wind that blows the trees of the forrest. The Huldra becomes the wind because she is kept alive through the breath that lives to speak the tale of her folklore.
Here is a rough example of how the animation will sit within the frame:
I really like the concepts and executions that Mimi has been sending through, I feel confident that we’re on the same page about how we want to project to look and feel. Just as she has been sending me visual explorations, I have been sending her sonic ones. This has allowed us to not only establish what we think is working well and coherently within this collaboration, but also what we don’t think works in each others experiments, and what doesn’t compliment the other’s. This has enabled us to finalise a more defined piece of interdisciplinary work that equally encapsulates our individual practices whilst still uniting through our work.
Alongside Mimi’s experiments, as mentioned, I have also been experimenting with sound, using the sources gathered from Radio Aporee.
Experiment 1 & 2 are made using the ‘Organ practice and sound check’ recording, put into logic, I then used the Alchemy sampler to chop up and manipulate the sound. These experiments are short and are just allowing me to see how I am able and want to use these samples within this composition. At first I thought the Radio Aporee recordings would accompany other musical sounds in the piece, however since completing these explorations, I feel it may be fun and interesting to try and create the entire audio out of recordings from the exact location of Bergen.
These short compositions helped me establish an idea on how to create the atmosphere for the final track, giving necessary inspiration for myself. I sent these experiments to Mimi, along with the sources from Radio Aporee so she was able to know the context from which the sound is coming from. By communicating these sonic trials with she was able to grasp how I intend to compose the music for this project, also allowing time for her to intervene with relevant comments and opinions about the audio before the final construction. Meaning the music and visuals are able to become more coherent through relation.
Experiment 3 involved the use of other recording from my previous list, again putting them into a sampler and playing with the sounds through midi. This technique of working with the recordings as samples seems to work well in creating the desired musical effect, whilst still keeping aspects of the audio unedited, therefore acting more as foley & field recordings. Because this seems to work, I think this is how I am going to carry out the final execution of the composition, only, using more recordings and creating an overall longer track.