Process Piece: The Band Practice

For our process piece, we decided to film Ian’s band, “Riveter’s Son”, during one of their practices as they worked on new material.  Filming a band writing a new song was an interesting experience.  There were so many different elements that were involved in the process.  Every member of the band contributed something essential to the process, whether it was setting up equipment, commenting on how the song should be played, or simply playing their instrument.    Listening to our audio recordings reminded me of the video “scriptures” by Dean Duncan.  In the video, even without looking at the video, you understand who is talking and you can picture all of the processes in your head simply by listening to the audio.  You can turn off the visual element to the video and still understand exactly what is going on.  We strove to do the same thing for our project.  We wanted the process to be presented unambiguously.  It wasn’t necessary to see the band members warming up or talking or playing their instruments because the sounds told the story.  By focusing on the audio elements of the songwriting process, we were able to create an image of a band at work solely through audio storytelling.

Editing the video together was exciting and introduced me to a new type of media I was unfamiliar with but enjoyed immensely. The advantage of audio editing, is that there is a great deal of freedom with how the clips are arranged, as the listener cannot notice discrepancies within the timeframe. This allows the audio editor to completely tell the story, often doubling up tracks or adding in pauses for emphasis, and I discovered in our case that one could actually make the audio more ‘realistic’ by editing. An actual two minute segment of the practice would not have portrayed the practice well, but a two minute piece constructed of many small elements from the whole two hours gave the full picture. It reminded me of my childhood, listening to Prairie Home Companion, especially the ‘Guy Noir’ line, and being enthralled with stories that are just words, music, and sounds. Other shows, like ‘This American Life’ and ‘Radiolab’ have absolutely brilliant editing, and epitomize audial storytelling at its greatest.

Ian Hawkes
Steven Olson

https://soundcloud.com/riveters-son/apartment-practice-january-29th-2015