Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Audio Recording

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

Audio Recording

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

Audio Recording

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

Audio Recording

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

Audio Recording

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

Audio Recording

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

Audio Recording

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

Audio Recording

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.