Author: CBE

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Building Content

A series of shots taken directly from the site could be boring or predictable/doesn’t really tell us anything more than what a nature documentary could. So what do we add into these videos that caters to our skill sets? Projecting on models is definitely a good move. Overlaying/multiplying maps could be interesting in the videos but we would have to make sure that that somehow comes through consistently and clearly.

Some other thoughts…

-Grabbing narrations from just about anything to fill up more sound

-We can use stills in places or as sequences. Sometimes that can be more powerful than a moving image.

-If we find any olde time stories/newspaper articles about Tacoma, those definitely should go in

-Thinking of sediments – it would be cool to start abstracting this a bit. I’ve been just shooting scenes from the site. But what happens when we just take sediments from the site and tell that story (that was confusing- basically super zoomed in footage to overlay on things or somehow get away from just always having big panoramas).

-Text narrations help

-How can editing be really manipulative, erosive, powerful, voluminous, damaging, degrading, depositing, other metaphorical things regarding sediments?

-We should think about sediments and these different waterways more conceptually – what does dredging/fill/repeat/volcanoes/etc look like spatially and theoretically?

-What is the personal connection in our episodes. Paddle to the sea is effective because it has this strangely personified thing the movie follows around. So how can we personify things more? -To make people feel attached we need to offer them a reason to care and “nature” scecnes might not do it – so how do we put the people in these scenes?

 

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Storyboarding

Storyboarding is a funny term in design. When we storyboard in school it has always meant to draw a doodle of what your final boards will look like and that can (kind of) provide a roadmap to what you need to produce. Maybe a more elaborate storyboard process sometimes used is that we sketch out graphics we’ll eventually have and utilize this to see what is missing.

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You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do

Defining our respective roles for this project has been a challenge. We knew from the beginning it would not be like a typical studio partnership, where the design is produced essentially in constant coordination. We would at times diverge and follow our own passions in segments of the project and hopefully sew these segments together to inform a more cohesive and comprehensive project. So, problem is, what does that look like exactly?

The important part about sewing our respective directions together, is that our respective passions are not lost to too much compromise. A thesis is, afterall, a time to do whatever the hell you want (to a certain extent…you might as well enjoy what you’re doing!). If we were to distill our original larger goals for thesis they were as follows:

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Drawing the Specific

This weekend half of the Lens & Tympanum team spent 18 hours immersed in a drawing workshop led by the amazing landscape architecture firm GGN. The weekend centered around drawing what you can’t see–using drawing as a way of grappling with the complexities of site and reckoning with what are often convoluted spatial relationships of built form to larger, geological pattern.  The GGN design process focuses on building up a rigorous understanding of the physical concept via site analysis, and that site analysis includes and even seems to center itself on these analytical, thoughtful, critical drawings that seek to identify the specific. I left the weekend feeling very inspired to dive into using drawing as one of our layered media to get at the specific, the fine grained, and the sensory in relation to the spatial.

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Seeing Space in Spectrograms

 

Spectrograms are pretty cool.  They’re handy tools to lend eyes to ears, and give a glimpse into what strange textures exist in the world of sound.  In this case, everybody’s favorite sound of sirens leaves behind the dominant signature in the spectrogram.  But what makes spectrograms even more useful is how they pick up an array of idiosyncrasies within a recorded scene.  Check out the diagram below to see what else exists in the cacophonous 8 second sound sample.   Continue reading “Seeing Space in Spectrograms”