Making Progress 2011

Mon 2 May 2011

Visit to the Third Maker:  Caroline Dear in Skye

My third visit was to Caroline Dear, in Fangan, which is a wee collection of houses a few miles on the other side of Portree if you come from the direction I did.  The run to Skye from Fort William was as beautiful as my drive to Caithness and reminded me again that there is such a spectacular and varied landscape right on my doorstep and I am a fool not to take advantage of it more regularly than I do.  Caroline’s house itself is on the tip of a beautiful miniature peninsula in a bay.  She described it to me in her directions as the house nearest the sea.  She told me later that it was technically the second house on the left in that wee road but visitors often found that concept too confusing and never quite found her with it.

Caroline has previous film making experience so following our initial chats in her house I was promptly taken next door to her adjoining (freshly tidied and organised) studio and shown a very fitting and clear foundation for a plan about how she would like for us to approach the making of her film. And (I’m touching wood while I write this) it all made perfect sense and I think it’ll reflect Caroline’s practise in the exact right way and I think we should have absolutely no problems whatsoever when we meet next (wood touching stops here). And after this the only thing for it was for us to step outside and take a wander around the fields where she collects the bulk of her materials and have a scout about for possible locations and backdrops.

Something I really enjoyed with Caroline, as with Patty, was being taught to look more closely at the natural environment.  This was not a spoken tuition, just through her looking and admiring I felt compelled to look and admire too and, during our relatively short expedition through the local area, I felt like I began to see with my novice eye how much colour and variety there can be in the undergrowth if you actually look. I might previously have wandered by this habitat accepting it passively as brownish with maybe a wee bit of green here and there but, whilst discussing with Caroline, I started to see vibrant reds and purples and oranges and yellows… It was a bit like those Magic Eye pictures but on a bigger scale and with much more impressive imagery.

And over and above all this I was very struck with how intertwined Caroline’s practise and day to day life appeared, to me, to be. Her house and studio are attached to each other and every morning she goes for a walk and collects material for the rope she will be making that day and I just got a strong impression that her lifestyle and practise are very successfully intertwined and so then I considered the idea that this was part of the weaving practise just on a larger more abstract scale. But this could all very well be because, after having looked over a lot of her work, I had weaving and intertwining on the brain. Anything is possible. Regardless of what is true, this sense of weaving and complimentary activity will form the framework for Caroline’s video and, again (touch wood) will all make perfect sense in the greater context of her practise (touching wood, again, stops now)

Filming with Nick Ross

Another slightly late blog entry although if truth be known I’ve been struggling to write about my day filming with Nick without it looking like I just copied and pasted the blog I wrote about filming with Patricia and changed a couple of words here and there… In short it went like this: the original plans got changed by outrageously bad (or wrong) weather conditions; we altered our plan quite drastically to accommodate this weather situation; we actually realised the new plan was probably better than the first and in the end had quite a successful afternoon filming together…

Well maybe I’m exaggerating Actually the summaries are the same but they, of course, were very different days with different obstacles and equally different triumphs. First of all, unlike with Patricia in Caithness,  it was vaguely sunny weather conditions we were hoping for but as it happened our scheduled day of filming fell on one of two or three hurricane style days that Scotland has had this year, where huge planks were falling from scaffolding and trees were being ripped neatly from the ground and flung like matchsticks across roads into oncoming traffic and I’m pretty sure at one point I saw at least three horsemen of the apocalypse come striding over the hills on the horizon… Okay, too much maybe, I do like drama. But the weather was rotten, too rotten for a standard issue tripod to battle against, so filming in Glasgow was scuppered for the day, as was our intended train trip due to weather based cancellations. But in the end we got the bus to Aberdeen instead and, lo and behold, by the time we got to Perth the world was nice and liveable again and we (I) forgot all about the fourth horseman.

As mentioned in my previous entry about meeting with Nick, our intentions for his film were twofold: to depict his traveling time, which is key to Nick’s practise as he used it for research and computer based development, and to also slot it’s making as unobtrusively into Nick’s travel time as possible, as using available time and resources efficiently is something that Nick does throughout his working life. And, after reflecting on why we had wanted to film in Glasgow at all, we realised that actually focusing on just one journey Nick makes regularly would perhaps be slightly misleading because actually Nick moves regularly between Glasgow and Aberdeen AND Inverness.

Upon this realisation, I decided that perhaps the extreme weather conditions in Glasgow were for the best in that it pushed us towards making a film that would reflect Nick’s travel time more open endedly rather than as a clear stepping stone between just two places So we got the footage we had always planned for on the move and back at his studio and, as is often the case in the east coast, it turned out to be quite a beautiful and sunny day in Aberdeen and I think we got a lot of nice shots to illustrate our overall concept.

So hopefully his final film has achieved both of our initial objectives. And, although I sadly missed Nick’s exhibition opening, I have been in to see it and thought it looked great. It’s still on for another week or so so if you’re reading this and haven’t been to see it yet I would thoroughly recommend popping in!

Filming the Final Film with Jennifer Cantwell

In the run up to starting on my fourth and final Making Progress maker’s film I was pretty excited for a variety of reasons, not least because finally I was to be working on my home turf! Throughout this project I have loved very much travelling around new and strange parts of the Scottish Highlands, meeting & working with new and interesting people, but there’s something to be said about getting to work in a place you love already. And it’s especially interesting to spend time being taught to observe a place you think you know well through somebody else’s eyes (or ears as the case may be…).

So after my initial meeting with Jen Cantwell in her cosy wee Forres studio we arranged that when the weather conditions were just right she and her partner/collaborator/sound technician/chauffeur Dave Martin would travel down and pick me up on their way to a day’s sound recording in Smirisary, near Glenuig.  So one beautifully sunny Wednesday somewhere in the middle of July that is exactly what happened.

After a quick hello and cup of tea at mine we all piled into Dave’s car and hit the road, chatting all the way about anything and everything: the project, people we knew in common, zombie films, electric ceilidhs… and of course about how lucky we were to have such a cracking day for roaming around the countryside. Now I don’t know if it comes with being a mum or from juggling a conceptual knitting practise with a commercial sporran design practise or if you’re just born with it or a combination of all of the above, but I got a strong impression from Jen that she had just the right balance of being super organised but within that framework of organisation left a lot of room for playing it by ear and just seeing how it goes. So this was how I decided to approach making Jen’s film. I knew I wanted to document the sound recording process, reflect in some way the sense of place and exploration that Jen has running throughout her work and perhaps get a couple of shots of wee birdies larking around but other than that I was very happy to just see where the day took us.

And as it happened, not only did we go to Smirisary, we also popped into the Glenuig hall (where we bumped into Pamela) and the forest beside it and then, on our way home, into the Lochailort Post Office, which is without a doubt the best post office I have ever visited in my entire life. By and large the day’s events ran seamlessly (well, after I learned to stop crunching loudly through the undergrowth with my camera and tripod, scaring away all birds in a half mile radius while Dave was trying to record them…).

That night Jen and Dave dropped me back at my house  and I had the opportunity to go over the day’s footage before the next day of filming up in Jen’s Elgin studio and see how the playing it by ear had gone and where I thought I would like to go next. For this reason, the next day in Jen’s studio was very straightforward. It was also great to be able to see the audio to visual transition of the bird sounds, from twittery chirping birdie noises to the clean and crisp sound waves on a glossy screen to a multicoloured textured piece of knitted fabric. And after this, our second and last day’s filming, I left Jen to her seemingly infinite pile of work while I went back to my much more manageable process of putting together all our sound and video footage. And now it’s all done, three weeks on, I genuinely hope that the resulting wee video from our two days filming together adequately reflects Jen’s practise in a way that she’s happy with.

And so I’d just like to say thanks to Jen and Dave for a great day out (and for my Solero, yum). I haven’t had a chance to pop into her exhibition but I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews so am very excited about taking a gander up this week!