AMEN BROTHER FINAL from Jon Saward on Vimeo.
I felt that the piece I had created was certainly in my mind an installation. It certainly had undercurrents of a mini avant-garde documentary that could sit on TV or possible on-line content or viral but I wanted to set it up for my tutors to watch it as an installation.
I booked out the black space at the university to screen it as I wanted a clear dark with no distractions from the work itself. Following this I then set about getting all of the technology together I would ned to make this happen. After the hassle and time consuming set up of the 3 screens I thought that this would be much simpler. I get together all of the kit that I would need and tested it to make sure it all worked although not in the actual black space due to time and hassle getting it all over there but i had basic measurements and knew it would all fit.
My first consideration was what to screen it on. Initially when the piece was evolving I wanted it big, huge on a screen and dominating a room and the audience both visually and aurally. However considering the piece I wanted it to be more intimate as the final film I had made was more characterful a representation of GC Coleman and getting this small insignificant figure at the end of the story the recognition he deserved. To this end I wanted a screening that would reflect him and celebrate him but not shout at the audience. I toyed withe the idea of a simple white screen hung in the space floating but this seemed too clinical and whilst it served my last 3 screen piece well just did not feel right. I wanted age, integrity and even the old being used to hold the modern exactly as in the Amen Break his old drum solo being given a modern interpretation through sampling technology to reinvigorate it and link the two.
The simple answer seemed to be to obtain an old home movie screen this being the old and the modern being the digital projector. I spent some time chasing around and sourcing one that I thought would work. I thought this idea worked really well and the old screen (as well as taking a projection excellently) had an older character. It also had the ability to be adjusted to various ratios and I could get it set to the 16:9 of my final piece.
As it sat there on it's tripod base and a little knocked about almost had a character of it's own and take on some of the character a to represent GC Coleman. The digital projector representing the new and the interpretation of the drum solo BUT as with the imagery of the music videos inside GC Coleman, the screen similarly held the digital images. the one complaint was that whilst I loved the screen as a means of exhibition and dissemination I would have loved it to be a little larger. It was just a little too small, and truth be told a little too low. However the concept of the old screen and new digital projector I loved. The set up in the black space of projector and screen is demonstrated below. The only added bit of kit I needed was a laptop to play the film through. This worked pretty well but a dodgy lead from the Mac to the VGA lead which managed to break in between testing and the final exhibition made things a little trickier than they should have been.
The projector was the best digital one that I could find although not an HD one that I would have liked. However it was fairly quiet had a pretty new bulb and plenty of lumens to project a clean image.
In order to get the piece looking slick I brought in some black speaker stands one for the projector to sit on and look professional and the other for the speakers to sit on. It was the usual awkward job of getting the image to project right and the very untechnical pieces of paper for minor adjustments to get the image level and filling the screen.
As far the sound went this was obviously also hugely important so I went for two good powerful speakers rather than smaller tinnier sounding ones. These were angled to either side of the screen for maximum effect on the audience. I did not want these to appear in shot so firstly I put them on a black speaker stand (see above) the same as the digital projector and hid them behind the projector screen. These were then connected to the Mac by a long sound lead.
The final screening went pretty well the sound was clean and the volume strong but not overpowering and I was pretty happy with the result. A bigger screen size would be the only thing that I would change as this would have put the piece at eye level and made it a stronger presence over the audience in the space.
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