Alongside the preparation of this project, my friend and colleague Sylvain Wenger helped me documenting our work by making short videos of the creation process. He started on a session at my place, then another one in Zürich. He also filmed a lot during the week we were all rehearsing, from Monday 19th of June to the final performance. I did not have time to edit this precious footage into a well cut making of. Instead, I made a selection of 10 videos from the rushes which illustrate different parts of our work. It is mostly in French, so sorry for this. As we had to handle a lot of tasks, this includes a lot of different things.
In there, we are finally rehearsing properly. Of course, some technical details are still being adjusted, but we could at least work on the content itself.
This video is just there to illustrate the fact that I had to familiarise myself to the Ql1 mixing desk. I did not have to become an expert at it. I just needed to be able to navigate it comfortably.
In this video, with Clärli and Luca, we are trying to figure out solutions to all our limitations. This is due to the fact that we had very little time to work on this project all together. Basically, the questions were about what we could do, especially regarding scenography, and who we should ask.
In this one, I am also trying to send the music to different speakers, but this time it is more progressive. This is why the patching was so important: here I can really control how much is sent where. And this was all doable in real time which is very convenient for live situations.
In this one I am discussing the question of visuals. Early on, there was an animator in the team. However, she had an accident and was not able to work on the project anymore. I also struggled finding a stage designer. This is why we decided to focus much more on sound in the end. This also went along the concept of lullaby: if people do not have too much to see, they might simply lie down and listen more. I also here raised the question of our presence (Sylvain and I performing the music). Indeed, us being there meant that some people would watch us. Then we had to decided how much we would encourage this.
In this video, we are discussing the transition between two parts of the structure (Young age to mid age). This is where I had to decided what musical elements would help for that purpose. The idea was hat everything would stay coherent in discussion. This also implies the other sounds than music (voice, recordings) and in what speakers.
In here I am simply showing a big part of my work: deciding how to patch everything. This was very important because of all the speakers I used in this project. I had to to it as efficiently as possible. I also had to prepare in advance to use the sound system available in PB 8. For that purpose, I also asked my mentor, Leandro Giannini, to give me a crash course on the Yamaha Ql1 mixing desk.
Here, I am talking about a group of words that Clärli and I recorded and how I want them to be diffused. Here is just the concept that will lead to a Max Patch. The idea was to diffuse those words randomly and be able to control both the density and repartition into speakers. This had to be made so that I can simply do it with MIDI controllers during the performance. I worked from the a granular synthesis patch that I had made following Olav Lervik's class. This worked very well in the end.
When getting very close to the performances, we were all adjusting details. For the music, it was really about organising cues and I had to explain my system to Sylvain. We first used a timeline on Google sheets as a sort of score, but then moved on to lists on our phones that helped us navigate the clues correctly in live situations. This also included activating Clärli's microphone and sending it to different speakers, as well as the light cues.