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HEAR MAKE HEARD
'My Mother's Blues' - Malika Booker
Thurs 12th Jan
Today I spent a few hours on the British Audio Archive website trying to find audio pieces that sparked my interest. The first one I found was called ‘Mr Tickle in an Indian accent’. It interested me because the way some of the words were pronounced and the emphasis that was placed on certain letters was very different to the way in which i would pronounce the words. This immediately drew me to the concept of culture and dialect and the fact that we find it striking when others pronounce things different that we do. `i also came across a 22m in audio of poetry written by a south American poet from Guyana Malika Booker. Her poetry resonated with me because my father is from Guyana and her accent is similar to his; therefore i believe i was able to pick up certain words and phrases that others from a different culture would perhaps not have. Today i have learned that a common interest of mine is cuture and dialect.
Tues 17th Jan
NEW IDEA: Creating a basic Spanish guide book because my mum has always wanted to learn Spanish because me and my sister are learning it and she's basically jealous. Also my mum claims that she never has any time to relax and enjoy herself. This publication is an attempt to help my mum to relax and gain something she's always desired to during this time.
first page - and written note so when its opened readers can see it was made for my mum
Note at the beginning in English and Note at the end in Spanish..
Universal anyone can read and get the same outcome - learning a few basic Spanish words
Handmade because its personal to my mum.
Today I spent a longtime being confused and not knowing how to proceed with my publication. During my crit there was a lot of laughter primarily because we were discussing the 'My Mothers Blues' poem which was all serious and then we moved straight onto the other audio which was more comical - Mr Tickle. For the poem we came up with ideas which revolved around the idea of femininity - the Strengths a woman poses or creating a book of empowerment.. with themes such as sexism. While these were good ways to translate the poem, I had no real burning passion or interest for the topics.
I was more fond however of the ideas that were generated for the Mr tickle audio. Exaggeration and the idea of using models with unusually long legs or arms was suggested. I extended these ideas by thinking about other ways to show exaggeration. e.g extra long arms/ eyelashes eyebrows etc. I think my next step will be to plan the shoot that i want to do. At the moment i have the idea of bring in block colour outfits and all the models can wear black shoes. I don't know if it will be more effective to have the same model in all the photos or different models to represent the different Mr Men characters.
Tonight im going to make some book formats based on the moodboard i have created.
I thought this font suited my Mr Tickle theme because Mr Tickle is always creeping up behind people and his arms always finding their way though doors and windows to tickle people. All the letters in this font feature a fold which symbolises a door.
Mon 16th Jan
Today was spent creating transcriptions of our audio files and brainstorming ideas for our final publications. I jumped both of the audios quite a lot to day. On my way to uni i was set on the 'Mr tickle' audio but after brainstorming the 'My mother's blues poem' I was quite drawn to that. The reason why is because i found a way in which it realted to psychology.. a key interest of mine. it linked through the common theme of pain that Malika Booker touched upon - in every line. I began to do a little bit of research into pain but realise that i couldn't think of a visual way to translate the poem.. besides creating a visual guide for how to relieve pain. I tried to think of ideas for how to execute a publication with such a title but it proved impossible. I spoke to Tim about my idea and he said that i was over complicating my work and the publication didn't actually have to have a practical application, He recommended that i made the project a personal translation of the poem by spending time with my mum and making a visual response based on how my mum responded to the poem..another suggest idea was to gain insight into the relationship between my mother and my grandma and visually portray their discussion on their thoughts on the poem so i could create work objectively. I thought about this idea but all in all i thought it was a bit depressing and I;mm quite a happy person who likes to make content which is enjoyable to read/view to its audience.
We were set a task to research and create a mood board based on our translation of our audio.Within this hour i looked through many magazines and picked out formats/ photos/ double page spreads that tickled my fancy. A key series of photos within a magazine was the series below.
While this series of photos doesn't link as such to the 'My mother blues poem' It did however link to the other favourite audio piece of mine entitled 'Mr Tickle in an Indian Accent'. This is because of the nursery rhyme ( Humpty Dumpty) reference made in the photographs. It came to mine that I could either create a big mr tickle and feature him in a photoshoot. or create a kind of 'wheres wally' themed photoshoot whereby i hide mr tickle in the photo some where.
I think research wise I'm going to look into accents and dialects primarily though especially the route of the Indian accent and see why hey pronounce the word 'tickle' the way they do. My presumption is that because in their language there is emphasis placed on words with the letters k and l next to each other but I will soon find out the real cause.
Tomorrow morning i will think of some other ways i can translate the audio into a visual piece.
Thurs 19th Jan
Today i did my shoot with Kimia. I started by taking standard photos of my model in her orange clothing. I had planned to take close ups of different parts of her body and elongate her eyelashes etc using photoshop but whilst shooting I came up with the idea of using slow shutter speed to catch the process of motion. This is symbolic of Mr tickle creeping up on people and the fact that his long arm is always moving around in hope of tickling someone. I thought i would switch up the location of the shoot because mr tickle never stays in one place. Hence I did a shoot in a hallway. Outside by some bikes and outside on a bridge. The best thing about todays hoot is that my outcome was completely different to what i had planned for it to come out like. This did mean that i had to work on my tip toes more and think fast but I am happy with the test outcome. My model was co-operative and genuinely had fun whist modelling for me. i thought it was just as important for my model to have fun participating in my shoot as it was for me to conduct my shoot as the story of Mr Tickle is a funny children's story which is meant to provoke laughter. Whats more, I am a fun person who enjoys spontaneousness; working with slow shutter speeds allowed me to create abstract one off outcomes which kept the adrenaline going and made me want to keep going.
On the other hand, while i had worked with slow shutter speeds before I had to think of the correct settings to use off my head. I am used to using manual as I feel like you have more control over the camera but IT really did test me when we changed the shoot location from Inside to outside. I had to reduce the ISO because of the presence of sunlight and increase the f.stop number.
I think to refine my shoot further i will set up a dark room with a black backdrop and maybe some orange lights and conduct a William George Wadman Inspired shoot.