For our project, we decided to use the form of an autobiographical
documentary to express a complex process. The process of our project was that
of social anxiety. It was inspired by thoughts or actions that we, or more
specifically, Jase, has experienced in his life. We wanted to capture a real
life situation and translate it into an audio form. Because of the nature of
this process, it being almost entirely in the thoughts of another person, we
had to recreate the situation with a simulated performance. There aren’t many
ways to document human thought other than voice over; so we staged the
vocalized thoughts of the subject by recording them in a controlled setting. In
this manner, performance further developed our project into something more than
a simple autobiography. We felt that the
he personal content of the process and the complexity of the idea could be
conveyed most simply through a staged yet genuine reenactment of actual anxious
thoughts.
A major
focus of our project was the genuine intimation of anxious feelings. The film Inception proved to be a great source of
inspiration concerning the reflection of character anxiety in sound. In a
critical scene in the film, Cobb tries to persuade Robert Fisher to trust him. While the two are talking at the hotel bar,
the background noise is faint and slowly gets louder throughout the scene. During the conversation, when the people
talking in the background are the loudest, a champagne glass shatters and
distracts Cobb with memories of his past.
This is the moment when the conversations in the background are
completely silenced, causing a heightened sense of anxiety. It is this stark contrast that creates an
emotional reaction in the audience. In
our audio process, we recreated this technique with a crescendo of sound by
increasing the layers of voice audio, amplifying the amount of anxiety
felt. When the noise silences and the
tension is released the listener is jolted by the by the abrupt change. As our
anxious subject finds renewed peace in his isolation, the audience is treated
to the comfortable quiet of his liberated mind.
Since
our process had to be fabricated to properly relate the idea of the piece, we
had to construct our own version of the beginning, middle, and end to social
anxiety. In the case of our process, we chose to document a choice of isolation
and detachment. The process begins with the subject’s self-conscious thoughts
and develops as he is admitted into a social gathering that further stresses
his anxious mind. As he spends more time in the awkward situation; the craze of
his worried mind quickly escalates until the subject is overwhelmed. Opting to
leave the gathering than suffer more anxiety, the subject completes his trial by
alienating himself from others. Like Borup’s My Mom the Taxidermist, not every attempt ends in success.
Sometimes the beauty of the piece lies in the process rather than the product.
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