sound slide

Spent the day working with skeins of sound and image - and it took me back to 1997, where I would spend most of my time in the basement of the University of King's College.

Though I suspected that I wasn't the broadcast type, I had chosen the radio/TV stream of King's one-year Bachelor of Journalism program - instead of the print stream, which after four years of working at the student newspaper at the University of Winnipeg, should have been the natural choice.

Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on your perspective (i.e. whether you have to live with me) - I'm never one to choose anything easy.

It has to be almost more than I'm capable of to be interesting...for the radio half of the slash, this meant wreathing myself in audio tape, wielding a razor blade and specializing in individual syllables and sputters.

For the TV half, it meant reviewing shot tapes that included extreme close-ups of the pores of my forehead, and having to watch as it puuuuuuuulled all the way out, so that the bags under my eyes were also visible.

All of which was in pursuit of stories. Stories that could be stripped down to 90 seconds, syllable by syllable.

As M and I worked to put together his second official soundslide today, we used a cursor to slice up the audio and another program to match the photos we'd processed with the audio...but there was the same sense of struggling to get the recorded information, all the disparate images and sounds, to act like a story.

It took us almost the whole day to tell a story one minute and fifty seconds long, and there are still a few gaps, a few places where the storyteller forgets his/her place, but we finished.

And I can tell you, without fibbing, that our dining room is a lot more comfortable than that basement studio.