Category: creative projects

The making of my audiovisual project had four different phases. 

1 – Memory Writing

2 – Video Editing and Structure

3 – Sound Effects Recording

4 – Sound Editing

Memory Writing

Writing and describing the false memory that I had took me two days. It is not as easy as one thinks it is. It is not a matter of trying to remember the most, but how to make meaning from those memories to those watching. Describing was easy because the FS (false memory) is as vivid as a real memory. I had to focus on the placement of the words and the feelings related to each thing on the FS. I first wrote it in English, but the result was unsatisfactory because it didn’t give me the sensation that I was truthful to what happened. Later I wrote it again in Spanish, and this time it was more clear to me. I wonder if language is also attached to that memory. Is Spanish the only way to decode the memory? Why didn’t it work with English or even Portuguese? The narration would also give instructions to the sounds that appear throughout the piece, so I had to be careful not to deviate from my primary purpose. 

Video Editing and Structure

As soon as I finished writing the narrative, I started looking for videos that could cover the piece’s imagery. I went to my video archive, and I found a couple of videos that I recorded on the bus back in 2019. I wanted as well to use footage from the films I referenced. Therefore I picked the service station scene from Watchtower. In this piece, images shouldn’t distract the spectator completely. The main goal of the image is to give a sense of mood and context and avoid being over-descriptive. In my opinion, the pictures that I used spoke from themselves. The spectator must not think, how does this place look like, but how does this space sound like. Nevertheless, as you can see in the video, the footage is looped, not giving them enough space to enrol. The editing started by placing audio references of my voice over the images and giving both elements time to breathe and act and later added all the sound effects that I wanted. 

Sound Effects Recording

I made a list of sounds that needed to be recorded and dedicated two days to this duty. I first recorded my voice in the studio and then recorded all the required foley: jackets, lighters, doors, cloth, footsteps, vocal sounds, breathing, etc. Some sounds couldn’t record myself: engines, buzzing, sliding doors, some specific footsteps. I’ve also contacted a couple of people to record additional voices for the guy on the phone with his girlfriend, the bus driver and those who expect us. For that, I counted with the help of my artist friends Sergio Argüeso, Ângela Ramos, Iyán Rojo. They recorded their voices by either using WhatsApp voice memos and handy sound recorders.

Sound Editing

It was a fast process. I already had all my ideas structured from the video editing sessions. It was only a matter of mixing and editing all the sounds recorded in the right place. However, the only part that I felt wasn’t easy was the ending scene, in which I was running out of time and had very few material and ideas to work with. I already surpassed the 5-minute mark and decided to give it a quick yet effective ending that only took 20 seconds. One exciting feature that sound editing has is music editing: I used the song Mi Jaca by Manolo Escobar, and it starts with a hybrid condition, either diegetic and extra-diegetic, transitioning exclusively to diegetic sound and then jumping in space and time to another location. It was fun to edit the song and give it different textures and tonalities depending on the area. Other elements, such as footsteps and breathing sounds, suffer the same things in other moments of the piece.

When I first decided I should develop this theme, I already had a couple of visual and sound references. They came to me almost instantly. I keep remembering a quote from my History of Cinema:

“The more personal is your art, the easier it is to come with something conceptually and artistically coherent”. 

And it is indeed true. However, there’s always space to polish your ideas, emotions and beliefs whenever you craft a very personal project. In my case, it took a week to develop under my expectances this idea. 

In this blog post, I will showcase all the references that I took into consideration in making the piece that directly relates to the theme that I discuss.

O que arde (Fire Will Come) by Oliver Laxe, 2019 – Spain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKsA59URHXo

The second intro of the film introduces the main character by showing his trip from Madrid to his hometown in rural Galicia. The imagery is composed of grey, grainy, and wet photography, resembling Northern Galicia. The character is experiencing both tiredness and anxiety during the trip because he is returning home after an extended period, back to the house where he was born, waited by his mother. However, there’s nothing relevant in terms of sound. 

Gözetleme kulesi (Watchtower) by Pelin Esmer, 2012 – Turkey

The film begins by introducing two main characters, focusing on the male one in the first instants. The character is on an overnight bus trip to get to the destination of his new job –  a forest ranger. That trip reflects a new cycle in his life because he is fleeing from his town and his past. I’m interested in the imagery and the sound – a calm monotony dominated by the sound of the bus’ engine that expresses a melancholic but ambiguous environment. I later introduced this idea in my piece.

Todo sobre mi madre (All about my mother) by Pedro Almodóvar, 1999 – Spain

In the introductory sequences of this film, the main character is forced to go back to a place that could be considered a past home. She is fleeing by train from Madrid to Barcelona, and the film uses the tunnel as a transitioning element between the two cities, representing the new path in her life and a “going back.” The scene is accompanied by a soft bass drone sound that I later used.

I Trawl the Megahertz (song) from Paddy McAloon’s album I Trawl the Megahertz, 2003

Not related to the theme I’m exploring, but Yvonne Connors narrates her life story in a very thoughtful way in this track. She abords are life-changing trips and decisions that turned to be a description of isolation, loss and heartache. I like how the “poem” is narrated, which inspired me to do something similar in my piece. 

For this project, I wanted to recall the Iberian culture in a non-literal way – not appealing to its costumes, musical traditions and other clichés that one can fall into when trying to describe a group of people. As I clarified before, my first idea was to refer to a single instrument used by both countries – zambomba. However, I managed to find a theme that can be ideally be liked with the peninsula’s culture – the migration culture. 

Iberians are constantly migrating ever since the discoveries era started and in parallel directions, especially to South America. But even inside the countries, migration can be seen everywhere: between countries, cities, provinces, communities. Most of the times, migration is attached to the loss or lack of something. The motives can vary between pursuing a job, a better and stable life, studying, and even running away. We can spot these happenings worldwide. For example, in London, between Stockwell and Vauxhall, resides Little Portugal, a large Portuguese community; in Manhattan, New York, there was a prominent Spanish neighbourhood.

But even inside Spain and Portugal, the fluxes of people never end. Many people are forced to leave their hometowns to go to the “bigger cities”. Those are Porto, Lisboa, Madrid and Barcelona, being the last two the most important. In my case, I had to “flee” from Porto and had to choose between Lisbon or Madrid (same distance). I picked Madrid because there were more opportunities there. This migration changed my life forever, and so does to everyone that experiences this. Sometimes I have contradictory thoughts about this theme:

 “I’m jealous over those who don’t have to leave their countries and their hometowns to seek a better life because what they need is already exists where they belong.” 

It is very frustrating not to work and exercise my art in the countries I belong to because they lack the things I need. However, the necessity of migrating have a good side. The feeling of “coming back” is ten times more potent when experienced under these circumstances. I started to respect the countries that I belong to more when I first left them one by one (First Portugal and then Spain). Also, by leaving the country, we found ourselves in terms of identity and ethnicity, but you also have an opportunity to see yourself being around many others. 

In my audiovisual piece, I want to portray my bus trips between Porto, Madrid and Barcelona, under the premise of false memory, allowing me to generalise all the situations that I’ve been submitted. I want to include the feelings and the thoughts that one has on those trips. Those would take more than 10 hours, and, in my case, I had to them overnight – cheaper and faster. With the help of narration, I intend to explore the exhaustion and emotional vulnerability provoked by the same. I would make these trips to either see my family or go back “home”. Home for me is a feeling that mutates constantly, and I have at least three all-around Iberia. 

“The Decandecy of the Human Being began when the homo sapiens developed the frontal lobe, which gave him the capability to plan the future.”

Rui Ramos

False Memories are actual events. Besides its unrealistic nature, they do occur to us. They are vivid memories of things that didn’t happen in a certain way, or sometimes, didn’t happen at all. How can we tell they are fake memories? When we get to a certain age, it is easy to differentiate between dreams, which I described on False Memory, Falso Recuerdo. When we are older, we are more conscious of what is real and what is not. 

My oldest fake memory takes me back to 18 years ago when I was three years old. I used to go on vacation with my whole family, including my grandparents. In this memory, we are in Ria Formosa, Algarve. It’s afternoon, and the weather is sweltering. I imagine myself in the hall of our vacation house, and I run from my grandmother’s hands to the street. I stood in the middle of the road, and I could see my mother and grandfather walking down the street in the direction of the beach to go clam digging. The last thing I remember was the big sized orange sun symmetrically in the same position as my mother and grandfather. 

This phenomenon is linked with the quality of suggestibility, which is when someone distorts the facts of a happening because of someone’s assumptions or even one’s emotions. The most evident example is when someone parks their car and forgets to lock it but has the absolute conviction and the memory of having closed it. Most of the times, the experiences are innocuous. However, false memories can be related to mental health issues such as post-traumatic and dissociative disorders, anxiety and stress overload, and sleep deprivation. These factors could guide a person to develop FMS – False Memory Syndrome – when false memories determine one’s conduct and relationships over an incoherent and distorted traumatic memory. 

However, false memories can occur, as said previously, in a harmless way. Its occurrence has to do, undoubtedly, with ageing. The older we get, the less intense false memories we’re going to have. But, we’re always going to have simple false memories (such as believing that we started the dishwasher, etc.) recurrently. In my case, I’m linking false memories with dreams. Because they are fake, there’s a tendency to exaggerate every aspect of the memory, so I thought that the best way to describe FM’s is the surrealist way, by not being 100% factual and realistic. The false memory that I’ve selected for my piece occurred to me a couple of weeks ago, which relates to the numerous bus trips that I took between 2017 and 2020 between Porto, Madrid, and Barcelona. (To be discussed in the next blog post)

During my Iberian ethnomusicology research, I rediscovered the zambomba – a friction drum – with a new set of eyes. I already knew the instrument and its usage context. It is commonly used in southern Portugal (sarronca) as well as Spain, during Christmas celebrations. My initial idea was to record that same instrument a make a spatial sound piece. I’ve contacted several sources, such as the Cultural Affairs of the Spanish Embassy, Cervantes Institution and other minor Spanish communities in Greater London. I got in contact with many musicians and percussionists who were firstly interested in the project. Throughout May, I tried to plan recording sessions with them to learn other different zambomba techniques. I was delighted with the outcome of the project. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the production of the piece. It was going to be my first time working with these type of instruments and ideas. But, unfortunately, I had to abandon this project since the artists I was in contact with started to raise some sceptical thoughts about the project, and my approach was, consequently, ignored. I couldn’t rely anymore on this project, and I had to rethink and rearrange my ideas.

Following my previous blog post, I decided to expand the iberianess theme to another extent. Even though I was not falling into the cliché with my earlier idea, since I would use an underground/forgotten instrument as a leitmotif to link both cultures, with an avant-garde approach on its sound recording and production.

Therefore, I decided to jump from a spatial sound piece to an audiovisual work. Back on the 29th of March, I came up with a unique fictional audiovisual format that focuses mainly on sound, with less reliance on the image. Image, in this case, gives the spectator a perception of the type of space that the character is inserted, despite the fact it stimulates the visual sense. In this format, I use footage that I either record myself or found in films I like. The images appear in a never-ending loop of 1 to 2 seconds. The sound is guided by either sound effects editing in a sound-for-film style but with an experimental touch and voice recording. The way I approach this could follow the modern ideas of surrealism and the perception of the unconscious being. In this format, the main idea is to appeal to the spectator’s senses through a nostalgic and monotone experience. If the spectator doesn’t feel connected to what he experiences in the piece, it would be considered a fail. The first attempt was published on my Instagram account, and I can say that the impact was quite surprising. I had many people approaching me and thanking me for that experience. The piece was called Fake Memory, Falso Recuerdo, where I describe a false memory that I had about a place that I’ve never been to. Description of the fake memory: I imagine myself on the beach in Latin America? Where exactly? I don’t know. But It’s 1am, I am drunk, and I’m dancing to some cumbia or reggaeton with my friends. Nevertheless, there’s someone who I can’t stop looking and smiling at. I used footage only from the film Y Tu Mama También, directed by Alfonso Cuarón in 2001 and archive material from archive.org. This time, I’ll explore this phenomenon even more by including my previous post’s thoughts.

My final piece for Creative Projects suffered some metamorphoses along the way. At the beginning of May, I explored Spain and Portugal’s ethnomusicology, hoping to reach a new definition of Iberian music. I discovered new sonic cultures and musical genres along the peninsula. Still, I could link various similarities between Spanish and Portuguese music, which I hoped to accomplish. It is still challenging for me to describe the feeling of belonging in the territory. I’m scared of sounding like a nationalist, but it is essential to connect with this land for me. For me, it’s not patriotism but understanding the people that I grew up with. I’m trying to comprehend a group of people by absorbing all their material and, most importantly, non-material legacy. For instance, the Portuguese are believed to be very melancholic and romantic by looking at their lives. A hopeful sadness. A constant battle against adversity. Desenrasque (Tinkering). 

But of course, these broad descriptions will only reach a level of ambiguity that can not describe an enormous group of people. In fact, inside this territory live 50 million people. Inside this 50 million, there are more than ten cultural groups inside them, even more, if divided by provinces, counties, and parish, etc. Pride would be the perfect word to describe every Iberian because they all feel very attached to a specific territory and defend it until someone gets injured. I think it is crucial to agree that what unites Iberia is its diversity, which is not very complex since we can all understand each other. The language barrier is something that not really exist – it is primarily psychological. For example, in La Raya Galega (name attributed to the northern Portuguese border in Galicia), people speak a fused language that is not north Portuguese nor Galician. 

The art that I intend to produce under this theme must be unbiased. I want to provoke in people the feeling of familiarity through non-explicit cultural aspects. For example, I don’t want to appeal to Iberian music by focusing on fado. I don’t want to generalise Iberian music by forcingly adding flamenco’s zapateo. I think that are things that connect us all apart from music, costumes and food. Behind that, there is a social and familiar context that is commonly ignored because of its vulgarity. I want to explore those things that I take for granted, or usual, and that, in fact, has a lot of emotional meaning for many people. 

Falso Recuerdo, Falsa Memoria, False Memory. This is a short film that I’ve done that talks about the psychological phenomenon of a false memory, usually known as FMS (false memory syndrome). In this short film, I discuss one false memory I have of something that happened supposedly last year. In it, I try to use sound as the main character and guidance for the story, Memory is the recollection of something that occurred in the past, but it is an FMS, that occurrence never took place, but the subject would have a strong belief and desire on that memory. Sometimes those memories are connected to something very traumatic, but in other cases are just regular happenings. This piece was meant to be my sound piece for the album.

Sometimes, this false memory makes me feel that it was a way to describe something I want in the future.

I wrote down the words past, present, and future, making me remember one of my favorite poems – Cântico Negro (Black Chant) written by the Portuguese poet José Régio, compiled in the book (Poems of the Devil and God), published in 1926 – who talks about one’s choosing its fate without caring about other’s wills.

"come this way" — some say with sweet eyes 
opening their arms, and certain 
that it would be good if I would listen 
when they say: "come this way"! 
I look at them with languidly, 
(my eyes filled with irony and tiredness) 
and I cross my arms, 
and I never go that way... 
this is my glory: 
to create inhumanity! 
to accompany no one. 
— for I live with the same unwillingness
with which i tore my mother's womb
no, I won't go that way! 
I only go where my own steps take me... 
if to what I seek to know no one can answer 
why do you repeat: "come this way"?
 
I rather crawl thru muddy alleys, 
to whirl in the wind, 
like rags, to drag my bleeding feet, 
than to go that way... 
if I came to this world, it was
only to deflower virgin forests, 
and to draw my own footsteps in the unexplored sand! 
all else I do is worth nothing.

how can you be the ones 
that give me impulses, tools and courage 
to overcome my own obstacles? 
the blood of our ancestors runs thru your veins, 
And you love what is easy! 
I love the Far and the Mirage, 
I loves the abysses, the torrents, the deserts... 

go! you have roads, 
you have gardens, you have flower-beds, 
you have a nation, you have roofs, 
and you have rules, and treaties, and philosophers, and wise men. 
I have my Madness! 
I hold it high like a torch burning in the dark night, 
and I feel foam, and blood, and chants on my lips... 
God and the Devil guide me, no one else! 
everyone's had a father, everyone's had a mother;  
but I, who never begin or end, 
was born of the love between God and the Devil.

ah! don't give me sympathetic intentions! 
don't asks me for definitions! 
don't tells me: "come this way"! 
my life is a whirlwind that broke loose, 
it's a wave that rose. 
it's one more atom that ignited...  
I don’t know which way I’ll go, 
I don't know where I'm going to, 
- I know I'm not going that way!

Régio was born at the beginning of the XX century in the northern village of Vila do Conde, a time where Portugal was living its last blows of the monarchy. Portugal was in constant metamorphosis, being death and poverty the price of these consecutive changes. In less than 30 years, Portugal killed 2 kings, implemented a Republic, had 45 governments from 1910 to 1926, killed a dictator, killed thousands of unprepared soldiers in WWI, and started one of the worst European fascist dictatorships in 1930, which only ended in 1974 with another war. José Régio lived all this, being defiant of everything that occurred throughout this period of time.

The poem works a manifest with modernists premisses that dictated his poetic work and the presentist generation – presentism is the philosophical belief of the inexistence of past nor future. It only exists an (eternal) present. Nevertheless, it is important to clarify the difference between presentism and eternalism – this last one doesn’t deny the existence of the past, although eternalists argue that figures from the past have nothing to with the present nor future.

If we analyze the poem, we can notify a constant interaction between the Devil and God, which represent the grotesque and the sublime. Their movement is the reason why the poetic subject is shouting because his attitudes are a reflection of their relation. Therefore his acts are stranger. His individuality resides in his choices and not in the paths everyone seeks. For him, it is imperative to always opt for a different way, even if it is obscure or difficult to cross – the necessity of being unique and being against destiny. He must avoid the future at all costs, and for him, it is not a problem to be placed in the same place as the crazy and the deviants, because he knows his psychological nature.

Creative Projects is a signature conducted by Gareth Mitchell and José Macabra. The following posts would be related to the thinking process for the album “I’ve been away but now I’m back” made by Group C.

Future can be very defiant to describe. As a part of group C, this thinking process was our first shot for a concept, being Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) the first recommendation to take place in our first meetings. Other films were presented concerning this matter, such as the 1982 film directed by Riddley Scott  Blade Runner or Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. By looking at all these films we concluded that the subject wasn’t describing the future, rather describing the present by using the future as a reference. Therefore we decided to challenge ourselves to do the opposite – to depict the future by using the past.

We managed to find a few ideas that connected to this theme such as the north-American record producer Daedelus, who does electronic music (mostly IDM and Hip Hop) fused with samples taken from pieces of music of the ’20s. A great example would be his 2002 album “Invention”, where can be found his most knowledgeable work, with tracks such as Pursued Lips Reply, Astroboy, Adventress, Muggle Born, and Experience (song sampled by MF DOOM on the track Accordion – Madvillainy).

The artist Nmesh, who is a prominent musician related to the vaporwave movement, a genre of electronic music acknowledge by sampling 80’s songs and slowing them down, giving it a very futuristic look. Cocktails in Space is a great example of his work: a track where can be heard a space symphony with a considerable amount of reverb, vinyl crackle, and some small voice samples that work as garnish. The result is a beautiful feeling of “missing” and a never-lived nostalgia. Last but not least, it was suggested a Frank Bretschneider’s album supper.trigger and label Raster-Noton, which belongs to the same artist, Carsten Nicolai, as known as Alva Noto, and Olaf Bender, in 1996. 

In a book called Retromania, by Simon Reynolds, it is explained this thinking as something that humanity does for centuries by doing questions like: is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward? or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times? He also refers to every avant-garde movement as arrière-garde, because for him almost nothing is new. The most evident example would be the renaissance movement, in which Greco-roman art was taken as a major inspiration. 

As for the artwork and title for our album, we as a group liked the idea of “dancing with the past in the future”, not only because we looked at our project as something “danceable”, but at the same time, aesthetically, we liked the idea of fusing both realities. At first, we were considering taking a photo of Joanna Besarab, our colleague, dancing, as she is a really good dancer. Unfortunately, this idea didn’t enough resources to be executed. Instead, we decided to look after photographs of Dance Hall’s from the ’50s – they’re mostly long shots of hundreds of people dancing. This feature would represent the past, as for the future, we decided to collage the previous photo in a space scenario, but with a ’60s aesthetic. This would be a final result, well done by Rocco Wallis:

Lastly, the thinking process for the title was quite interesting, whereby we decided to select a line from the bar scene of Kubrick’s The Shinning. In that scene occurs an interesting phenomenon – the director induces the spectator to believe that Jack is hallucinating and that he can see and dialogue with people that lived in the Hotel he is in. Nevertheless, Jack uses the past to describe his current situation, while the imaginative characters describe him with occurrences that will happen in the future. In some way, this scene matches themes with our project, so we decided to take on the lines of that scene as the title for our album. I’ve been away but now I’m back.