Rainforest Microcinema and Soundscape

Yesterday (Weds 14th), I spent the day with my partner and frequent collaborator Ulysses Black experimenting with creating a rainforest experience using microcinema.

I realised my projector had packed up, so we just made a film of it on my phone camera, rather than feeding it onto a projector, but it was still a really valuable experience.

We created a small installation using objects that could potentially represent a rainforest, such as twigs, scraps of green fishing net, a potted rosemary plant, leaves we made from paper and pieces of string. We then filmed this in a dark room with some mood lighting (a little desk lamp pointing away from it, and a bright light from above shining through a scrap of cardboard with holes and slashes cut into it, so that “shafts” of light could shine through the “canopy” onto the “forest floor”).

Here is the best of a load of little films, after adding some filter effects and making adjustments of contrast, tone etc. We also made a rough soundscape, layering free sound effects downloaded from BBC sounds and Zapsplat, and sounds created ourselves.

This was just an initial experiment, and to develop this we thought it would be more interesting to change the place a little, stopping here and there and being more intentional about the movements, and having the sounds respond to the movement of the “person holding the camera” and vice versa.

Of course, this is slightly different to live microcinema, because we are editing a video, but it’s good practice and further along the line we will try and see if we can incorporate some of these elements (though I’m not sure yet how we would add live sound) into a live feed from a webcam onto a projector.