Friday, February 25, 2011

Scouting a Location

2/14: Drove diagonally across Bamako from our home base in the South West corner to the North East area to scout a location where a donso n'goni (bass n'goni) instrument maker had his shop. It's on a hill overlooking several domes of a large mosque still under construction. The sound of many voices from an unseen market or public gathering of some kind funneled upward, amplified by bouncing off the stone buildings lining narrow alleyways. A pile of broken stones in the artisan's flotsom and jetson strewn dirt yard gives a post apocalyptic look to this place.

A number of shoots this week have minimal audio requirements - human interest stories,instrument making, on the street interviews - segments without music performances. I hang back and do rough mixes in the Production Room.The roughs give me a good idea as to how the recordings turned out - so far, so good! I'm finding the audio from the camera mics quite useful for picking up good ambience.

For a transistion piece, I was asked to buy a small radio and record the static and tuning in to various radio stations across the dial. I discovered BBC Africa which I've been listening to since. Their, bold, person on the street/reporters in the thick of things broadcasts with the attendant background sounds is confrontational and often quite shocking. The violence in Libya seems to reverberate throughout the African continent and, presumably, the world. Things seem very volatile to me.

No comments:

Post a Comment