Behind the Scenes of the Your Sonic Forest Video
Folder of photos taken during the exhibition.
I was invited by the summer school team to make photo and video documentation during the Sensing the Forest Summer School, to capture the sound installations made for the exhibition and some of the behind-the-scenes moments. The summer school to me was going to be a nice break from my research work, as well as a chance to learn about some of the nature IoT, environmental design, and forest research.
AV Documentation Onsite
A few weeks in advance, the summer school team provided a detailed schedule and protocol, as well as a map of the site, which was very helpful in envisioning the exhibition and planning out what specific activities needed to be documented. I packed my equipment for the AV documentation a few days before departure - a Sony A7RII digital camera, a telephoto 70-200mm lens very good for distant subjects in the forest, a tripod, camera flash, and portable charger, plus a lot of lens wipes just in case.
The summer school started with a keynote given by Luigi, project updates from the summer school artists, and a visit to the Forest Research led by Mike. Then, the summer school artists started working on the assembly of their projects along the Willows Green Trail. I also took a trip around the site to get familiar with the terrain and the spot of the installations to make sure that I wouldn’t miss any of them. I took mainly photos instead of videos on the first day - one thing I like the most about walking around and around the trail and seeing the installations incrementally built up by artists. With the telephoto lens, I was able to observe the construction processes at a distance, without distracting their flow too much.
The exhibition started on the second day with lovely weather. I spent some time on each installation to record footage of them. I tried to stay on the walking path when recording the videos, to recreate an “audiences’ view” of the exhibition. The walk along the trail was a pleasant and immersive experience - the sound from one installation gradually transited to the next one, feeling like discovering pieces of gem in a forest.
Video Production
The production of the video started a few months after the summer school. The footage lay in my hard drive for a while before I reopened them to gather usable pieces - this feels like a time capsule made of sounds, which immediately took me back to the lovely soundwalk at Alice Holt. The edit of the video was inspired by an exhibition video from David Nash, which presents a narrative of a collection of works from the artist. I used the map on the leaflet designed by Johana Knowles to refresh my memories of the exhibition, and I found that it could be a nice visual guide to lead the narrative in the video. So I organised the footage according to how they were presented along the Willows Green Trail. The establishing shot at the beginning of the video was provided by Ed Chivers.
Something I feel that is missing from the video is perhaps the making process of the installations, it would have been nice to add some of the recordings from day one, or perhaps even the prototype phase before the on-site summer school to expand the timeline - longer than the ephemeral moment when the installations were presented on-site.
It was a genuine pleasure to attend the summer school as both an audience - to enjoy the soundwalk along the Willows Green Trail at Alice Holt, and as someone who was behind the scenes - to observe the making processes of the installations. I’m very glad that I was a part of it.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ed Chivers who provided the hi-res videos recorded along the Willows Green Trail, Anna Xambó who provided the screen recording of the Pure Data patch using data from the data logger, and Luigi Marino who provided the photos of the streamer.