THE FAIR
Produced by Jason Rayles
Producer
Notes
I shot this video at the Brockton Fair using the
cheapest digital video camera I could find. When I
shot the video, I intended to use only video stills
from the footage for a book that I was making, so the
camera work leaves a whole lot to be desired; I did
lots of quick pans and zooms to find and frame as many
interesting things around me as quickly as possible.
 |
Because the audio capabilities of most video cameras
(including, yes, mine) is so crummy, I recorded the
sounds from the fair onto a minidisk using Sonic
Studios head worn binaural microphones. They look kind
of like headphones, but they sit in front of your
ears. I felt a bit like Dork City, USA, using them,
but I was there on a mission, so I put on the
emotional armor and forged mightily ahead. If I were
making a strictly video piece, then I probably
wouldn't record onto separate media b/c it's a hassle
to synch everything up, but b/c the audio didn't have
to be perfectly tied to the video, I wanted to get the
best quality sound that I could.
Jay saw a copy of the book that I made, and asked if I
was interested in doing a radio piece with the audio
that I had. Obviously, I agreed, and I thought that I
would simply give an impressionistic ramble of the
things I saw at the fair. The radio story went
together pretty quickly, in maybe 2 weeks. I had
already done a lot of audio editing for the readalong
cds in the books, so I mostly assembled snippets of
that in Pro Tools, and laid a voice track on top of it
at home. During the course of the editing, Jay
discovered that I make a living doing computer
programming and animation, and he knew that I had
video from the fair, so he asked if I wanted to make
an animation to go with the audio. I agreed.
The animation took forever. I worked on it in my spare
time, and early on, I established a fairly quick pace
for the animation. I wanted to maintain the pacing
throughout the piece, but I didn't have much good
video to work with because of my frenetic camera work,
so I had to keep grabbing stills from the video,
exporting them, bringing them into Photoshop, editing
them, bringing them into Flash, laying them out and
animating them. Over and over and over. My original
idea was to have more drawings and frame by frame
animations similar to the ferris wheel animation in
the NIGHT section, but in the interest of actually
finishing the piece, that didn't happen.
About Jason Rayles
I live in Somerville, MA. My likes include Stereolab,
Will Oldham, Cat Power, Fugazi, Modest Mouse, Jay-Z,
Scout Niblett, George Saunders, David Foster Wallace,
Jorie Graham, Stevie Smith, Billy Collins, Brother's
Keeper, Hoop Dreams, Wild at Heart, Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind, Matewan, Martin Scorcese, Cindy
Sherman, Chuck Close, Chris Ware, Goya, Bosch,
Strangers with Candy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, milk,
rice, and cats.
Related Links
Jason Rayles' Website
www.23grand.com
TRANSOM SHOWS: Jimmy and Jewel - A Love(?) Story
www.transom.org/shows/2003/200306.rayles.jewel.html
TRANSOM GUESTS: Alan Berliner's 13 Ways of Looking at Sound
www.transom.org/guests/review/200402.review.berliner.html
Additional support for this work provided by
with funding from the
|
Discuss Show
Email a Friend
Print Page