Of man, monkey… and the value of a good tutorial

Caption: Man is bringing a monkey to a fast food restaurant in Kiev’s Maidan underpass…

(Why the hell is this man bringing his monkey to the restaurant? :-)

When I set out to photograph my major project in Kiev, I was determined to create a multimedia piece out of it… Apart from the visual impressions, the sounds and the music of the underpasses were just too ubiquitous and too important to ignore… As you know I did a fair amount of recordings of the sounds of the underpasses (see my blog entries ‘Sound of the Underpasses Vol. 1 and 2’) during my stay in Kiev.

When I came back and started to edit my work further, I commenced to have second thoughts… The idea of creating a book out of it began to become more and more alluring… Especially since I have asked a few native speakers (including my Russian teacher) to translate some of the song texts that I have recorded… So the idea of positioning lyrics and images started to take shape in my mind (and in prototype form on my computer using InDesign)… I became infatuated with the possibility to create something more tangible and less ephemeral than a multimedia piece. I also like the tactile quality of a book and the more permanent character, allowing the viewer to go through the book at her/his own pace, with the added possibility to go back and forward at one’s own whims… A multimedia piece is far more prescriptive and imposes a strict sequence on the viewer… and how many viewers will have the patience to sit through a 6 – 7 minute piece?

So yesterday I had my first tutorial with Brigitte Lardinois at college to go through my edit and questions such as book versus multimedia piece… When I played some of the sounds to Brigitte, she was very clear that a multimedia piece would be much more powerful in my case. The images and the sounds just belong together; they almost form a certain unity. It would also be a waste not to use the sound recordings I have made (and have in rather good quality).

When I saw that Brigitte was leaning back, closing her eyes and absorbing the sounds, I knew she was right… That is the value of a good tutorial with an experienced hand…

This has brought about the decision to create a multimedia piece… but now the hard work starts… I reckon it’ll be quite a number of iterations to marry the sound with the images… I expect numerous edits and re-edits of both sound and images… Better get started… Incidentally, there has just come out an interesting piece on the Magnum Blog on the subject of sound and image and how Magnum In Motion goes about creating multimedia pieces…