Ambience of The City

Previously, the wider project of ‘The City’ was introduced to us as a group of 30 or so actors. Intending to make a film that was just a singular shot of different situations and events in and around Sheffield, we had planned and begun filming in our new locations.

This time, we watched back everyone’s film in order, so we could see what the film would look like when we actually did it in one shot.

Rehearsing and recording our new draft

After watching ours back, I realised my group and I could play with being more unexpected through exaggerating costume and playing with our location just that tiny bit more.

For me specifically, I realised that I wanted to give my character more personality. Because the other two actors in my group really exaggerated the traits of their characters, it seems like I’m underplaying mine quite a lot, so it would be interesting to see what I can do so that my energy matches theirs.

On reflection of the larger film as a whole, we thought we might actually not have to have it as a one shot film necessarily. We saw that one film ended with an image of the sky, and the next one started with that. This made us realise we could fix the issue of having long, potentially less interesting transitions by having seamless cuts between locations, making it look like it was shot in one take instead of actually doing that.

We also thought we needed something that brought all of the sections of the film together.

An example of the satchel being present in our film

This landed us at the idea of the satchel being passed around as this, or a briefcase, appears in a few different films. We thought a lot of the films represented the idea of passing around information but not getting any closer to a solution, so the constant presence of a satchel or briefcase could symbolise this.

Another idea we had to join films together was ‘wanted’ or ‘missing’ posters because a few of the films contained robbery, crime or characters going missing.

So far, our films have been mostly silent, so we decided it was time to create some audio.

Individually, we went out into a place in Sheffield, in which you could sit without attracting attention to yourself, and observed our surroundings. As we began to notice things, we wrote them down in simple sentences:

The view I had from my discreet place in the city centre

A man waits for the bus.

She puts her hands in her pockets.

He plays a discordant tune on the recorder.

In doing this, I began to find intrigue in the little things. I found myself thinking ‘Oh look! That light is flickering’ or ‘How interesting that three people are waiting at the bus stop’. The ordinary began to become extraordinary.

After we had returned with our fragments of the city, we experimented with reading them out in different ways over a microphone. What would happen if we spoke quicker, slower, if we cut each other off at the end of our sentences or left a long pause before we spoke?

This got us thinking about how we could integrate this into the live or filmed part of our performance.

Over the next week, we are going to do the task again but collecting fragments from the locations of our films, in order to integrate a wider area of the ambience of the city into our audio.