Tesse's second pfaptmomnbm

Proposal for: THE DOME REPORT

The Dome Report is a short audiovisual report, or video log, of a trip I took last week. I was staying in an alienesque dome-shaped house close to the forest and took many photos, videos and audio recordings. This video will be a narration of the written log I kept while I was there, describing everything I did in relation to my ongoing research, supported with the audio and visual material.

I used this trip to gather material for different potential projects, but I am feeling a bit stuck in which directions I want to take with those. I feel it would be a good exercise for myself to simply lay out what I have gathered, using this format of showing the evidence or reporting back to a hypothetical someone — which really is myself — justifying that I am not just doing “nothing”.

Most of the material has already been written and shot, so the main thing is editing. I still have to record the voiceover that reads out the report and add some images of the books I was reading and the films I was watching as part of the research. Then I will just follow the narrated log to organise fragments of the images and sounds accordingly. The filming/photographing/recording took place over the course of four days (an afternoon, two full days, a morning). The collection of the additional material, the voice recording and the editing should only take a couple of hours.

This clear formal structure is something that has helped me before. In my bachelor graduation project, I gave myself a set of rules to film something each day during three months, which gave me something to fall back on when I didn’t have a lot of clear ideas about the content. Also in the work itself, there was a recurring sound recording that were parts of a narration of my timetable for one day in that period, with the times read out as if written on a calendar. The exemplary presentation of the activities, combined with a sarcastically upbeat tone of voice, allowed for a way to communicate the struggle implied in the activities without actually having to show that struggle.

The origins of the idea vaguely got put in my head a week before the trip, when reading H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. The whole book could be seen as a report of her experience of training a goshawk, but more clearly, there is a passage where she talks about the diary she kept during it, notating the weight of the hawk, how far she flew, etc. Apart from these statistics, seemingly unrelated and more subjective things made their way into the notes. This idea came back to me during the second day of the trip, as I felt I was going through the actions like some type of investigator or that I was simply following the instructions I had subconsciously given myself. Perhaps training my mind, my eye or my camera, rather than a bird.

Rapid Prototype Collect visual representations of the materials you were reading/watching as mentioned in the written log. The source should be visible.