Mouthing OffRoss Walker, James Swallow, Caitlin Willcox

Our initial ideaThe very first incarnation of our idea was coined "Kitchen

Song". It was intended to be a rhythm consisting entirely of sounds associated with the typical kitchen.

After seeing Tango (1981, Zbigniew Rybczyński), this idea evolved.

Tango creates an incredibly chaotic and abstract scene using numerous overlapping and intertwining visuals.

Could a similar idea be done with sound?

Developing our sound projectSince our idea still revolved around the theme of rhythms, we

decided that the subject of the project should be something that exhibits some form of rhythm.

We decided that the rhythm would be presented via the monotony of a person's repetitive morning routine.

Sounds would consist of things such as yawning, making breakfast, and getting changed.

The rhythm would not be a rhythm in the sense of a song, but rather as a series of overlapping and repeating sounds.

The sound of a heartbeat was added to provide a metronome; created by rhythmically tapping on a pin board.

Sound project completeUsing the sounds that we had recorded, we were able to arrange and edit our

sounds with relative ease with the use of Avid Pro Tools.The final product mostly stayed true to our original idea: a series of sounds would

intertwine and overlap to create a very chaotic and abstract scene; similar to that of Tango.

We were mostly satisfied with the final sound project. We felt as though the intertwining and overlapping sound succeeded in being reminiscent of the visuals seen in Tango (1981); as was our intention. Feedback confirmed this for us.

In retrospect however, once we knew what we wanted to do with the experimental film and how it connected to the sound project, many more interesting and innovative ideas came to us. As it stands, waking up in the morning turned out to be a very generic and derivative concept to base our entire body of work around.

Video Project We then set about applying visuals to accompany the sound project that we had

created. Our initial idea was similar to that of Tango: one person would act out the actions

being depicted in the sounds; all of which would be shown within one shot, creating the impression that this one person is simultaneously performing all of these actions.

However, we began to realise that this may have been a little too ambitious given our lack of experience with special effects of this nature.

Instead, we decided that the visuals should provide an interpretation of the sounds, but not necessarily literally. This is where the experimental film An Optical Poem (1938) helped influence our ideas.

An initial idea was that a series of mouths would interpret the actions depicted in the sound (not always literally).

We then decided to expand this, in that interpretation of the sounds would be done by numerous parts of the body, such as eyes shutting being coupled with a slamming door, and the tilting of the head being coupled with the pouring of cereal.

Om Om (1986) by John Smith is a short experimental film that

explores the ways in which sound and visuals can be used in combination to evoke certain meanings.

The focus of the film is a young man who is depicted to be some sort of monk. He wears what seems to be an orange robe and is breathing in what appears to be incense.

He hums "Om", a sacred sound and spiritual icon in Indian religions. The man then begins to have his hair shaved; his humming coupling with the sound of the razor to imply that this is in fact where the sounds originate.

The end of the film reveals that the robe is in fact a barber's gown, the incense is in fact a lit cigarette, and the man is what appears to be a skinhead.

Smith intelligently uses a combination of sound and visuals in order to coax the viewer into developing false assumptions.

This idea inspired us to explore the ways in which combinations of sounds and visuals could be utilised to connote various meanings.

In our film, sounds could be coupled with several different video clips to create several different meanings, similarly to how the combinations of visuals and sounds in Om trick the viewer into developing false assumptions.

What type of experimental film is ours?Given its focus on the combination of sounds and visuals, its

frequent close-ups focusing on specific parts of the body, as well as its noticeable lack of narrative or structure; we believe that our film falls into the category of "Pure Abstraction".

The definition of an abstract piece of experimental filmmaking is that it focuses on things such as sound, shape, colour, and light rather than a narrative or a particular theme. Our film can be quite easily categorised into this description given its focus on shape, sound, colour, as well as the ways in which these elements can be combined to create a variety of effects.

Critical analysis of our final filmWe feel it provides interesting combinations of sounds and visuals

in order to create a variety of effects, including comedy.It was an original and stylistic idea that unlike our sound project,

wasn’t too similar to those of our peers.The imagery of the last two cycles lacked the polish and

synchronicity of the first two. This is due to Avid Media Composer’s operations slowing as more and more clips were layered on top of one-another. By the end it became a chore just to place clips.

The film could have perhaps been more visually interesting with alterations to the mouth or using different subjects. Indeed, we had ideas to improve the visuals before filming, but ultimately, those ideas were simply not included for time.

What would we do differently next time?Industrial sounds such as those captured from the myriad of

construction sites around Sheffield would have created a greater dissonance with the bodily visuals and thusly reflected our intentions for the imagery to provide a representation of the sound, but not necessarily literally.

The mouth is rather uninteresting and could have been made a much more interesting subject. We came up with the idea of badly applying lipstick or using a variety of mouths with a variety of colours. We attempted to rectify this during editing but ultimately, it seemed altering the colour of one screen during the split screen sequence altered them all and finding a work around was too much of a hassle given our time constraints.

Individual Contributions James Swallow: My most prominent contribution was being the editor for both the

sound project and the experimental film, during these processes I had to learn how to use the Avid software, Pro Tools and Media Composer and how to export a session of Pro Tools to Media Composer, something the programme was apparently not meant to do. My second most prominent contribution was being the subject for both projects, i.e. - I was recorded making weird noises and then later I mimed my mouth to them. Most of these were improvised.

Ross Walker: The concept of our final film originated from my initial “Kitchen Song” idea; in that rhythm would be used as a medium through which to present the relationship between visuals and sound. In the actual production of the projects, I aided James in editing by helping with small issues and by researching different useful editing techniques. During filming, I used the raw recorded sounds that I had uploaded to my Soundcloud account in order to provide our subject (James) with a reference from which to interpret these sounds visually. I also wrote most of this PowerPoint.

Caitlin Willcox: I was responsible for a majority of the camera operations and cinematography present during the film. I also recorded most of the raw sounds that can be heard in both the audio project, as well as the final film.