Meat Factory Ear Worms

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/the-curious-ear-doconone-meat-factory-ear-worms.html

Created by: Richie Beirne (2008)

On Thursday 17th November, in our seminar we looked at many different sound recordings to give us an insight into the type of thing we should be creating for our audio project.

This sound documentary stood out for me because of it's many different layers. It's about a man who doesn't enjoy the repetition of his job in a meat factory, and how music is his motivation to get the job done.

The sound of cows being taken into slaughter, and the use of knives and saw is consistent throughout the piece. They are all echoed to really give a sense of the space in the factory. There are a lot of crashes and bangs of many, which are all sounds you would expect to hear inside a factory. Although you can't see anything, this allows you to imagine where the narrator is. There is a really interesting bit at the beginning of the documentary, when the instrumental music begins which completely constracts the brutality of the job. He says the word 'sweet smell' as the music is playing, but the music stops when he says 'of a back bone being sawed in half'. This emphasises the fact that music is his distraction, when the music turns off, the reality of his job hits him. I thought this was really clever.

The man begins to tell us about 'Ear Worm' songs, the ones that get stuck in your head and you can't get them out. He also describes the process of slaughtering a cow, he voice is quite monotone during this to show how such a horrific process does not even bother him anymore. I like how the mood constantly changes with the juxtaposition of the music and the narration. It helps to distract from the grusomeness of his job.

Sense of Space: Audio Project

Our previous Edale project asked us to create a portrait of a place using solely moving image. Our next project is to do the opposite, give a sense of space through sound. It is a 3-minute project to create an actual or imagined space. There are not many rules to this which gives us complete creative freedom to record any space we want.

This is a pairs project and I shall be working with Clarice Flack.

Portrait of Place: Edale

Right in the heart of the Peak District is the very small village of Edale, which was set to be the location for our 3 minute film. Creativity was key for Portrait of Place, allowing us to create almost anything that we wanted. At first it was difficult planning a narrative and shot ideas for somewhere I have not even heard of, let alone seen. After some careful research, me and my partner Joeley began to brainstorm some ideas... Most Joeley's idea, I won't attempt to steal any credit, we settled on the story of an Edale stone. It's journey through the village and how it gets dispositioned by everyday life - we thought this would be an interesting concept. My role involved turning an idea into something filmable (if that's a word). As the group member with filming experience I planned some shot ideas and how I thought we could show it's journey most effectively.

Me filming in the rain at Edale - it was just as
important to keep both the camera and my hat
dry.

On production day, we walked around and found a beautiful river, with a small waterfall and a bridge. We experimented with different angles to try and create something dynamic and experimental. One great idea was to have the stone going down the waterfall and into a pipe, which connects it to the river. This shot was based purely on luck and good timing. When looking back at the footage we thought this worked very well, and we slowed it down slightly to emphasise it's success. We got many different types of shots and were really happy with our footage, now we just need to edit it all together!

*UPDATE
Now all the footage has been edited we've realised that we should have done more filming on the day. Because the edited is so precise, it meant the running time is a lot shorter than we intended. This has taught us to shot more footage than we need just in case, we could have done some general shots of stones in different places that could use if we needed to. In the end we are happy with our film, it's not perfect, but the narrative makes sense are shows what we wanted it to.