Steve Whitford, Portsmouth University
The art of location-based sound recording specifically, has been a neglected area of academic research. I seek to address this by drawing critical attention to the intricacies and skills involved in location sound recording within the observational genre. I show how this art continues to be central to the creative process of production, in driving the narrative and shaping the text’s influence, within the pro-filmic space.
I go on to consider the future for location-based sound recording within the observational genre and its place in a new multi-platform, multi-screen consumption space. I seek to define a new working methodology and aesthetic for the craft and art, predicated on an anticipated resurgence of the observational genre, centred around opportunities afforded by the emerging technologies of immersive sound: ambisonic microphone arrays being a vital part of that development. Ambisonics is a method for capturing a full 3D sound field, and its genre-bridging adaptability means it can be converted to a dynamically steerable binaural format. I argue that deploying an ambisonic-centred location sound recording methodology, fused with the art of recording unscripted actuality sound within the pro-filmic geographic event-space, will offer new creative opportunities impacts for observational makers and crucially, tomorrow’s observational audiences. Presenting audiences with an exciting new ability to experience the sense of geographical place and physical event that immersive audio delivers, bears the potential of re-invigorating a content-driven observational market, which once again, will foreground the primacy of neglected storytelling capabilities, in a new consumption world.
Biography: For 28 years, Steve was an Observational Documentary Film/TV Sound Recordist. He won a Royal Television Society Award for Fighting The War”(BBC) series, with Film Credits at www.whitford.net . He is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, and Course Leads MA Film & TV Production. He retains memberships of industry bodies: Institute of Professional Sound and Association Motion Picture Sound and had been published in ‘Line Up’, ‘Cinema Journal’, ‘Soundtrack’ and the ‘International Journal of Creative Media Research’. He is published in proceedings: ‘BARN Colloquia’ and ‘Festival Cinema, Avanca’, and presented at ‘MeCCSA Annual Conference’ and ‘Geographies Sound: Cremona’.