Thursday, June 15, 2006
A crazy work day but made much progress. I finished reviewing thousands of images and selected slightly more than 600 to present with the Malaysia poems next week. 600!! Seeing everywhere we’ve been again made me realize what a beautiful journey it has been (and still is) for us here. Then there was the matter of how to present such a large number of images? In .html using refresh tags? In Flash? Neither of these I could take as serious options, as I’d have to resize all of the images and put a lot of time into the preparation of files. If I had a month to do it, and a team of assistants, that would be one thing, but the gig is in six days. Finally I realized I could—as with the doors—make use of the Windows “My Pictures” slideshow feature, which optimally resizes the images. Now all I have to do is rename the images alphabetically/numerically so that they appear in a reasonable sequence. There are other aspects/complexities as well, like which pictures get shown when, but I think I’ve have been able to work out a reasonable plan. If all goes well I’ll be having a tech practice tomorrow afternoon and we’ll see if the scheme works with the projectors. I hope it does!
I also managed to work on the audio tracks today, and mixed together all of the soundtracks I want to use (5, four with poems) in the Malaysia set. What I discovered is that the set is rather long—perhaps 10 minutes longer than I expected—but maybe that’s OK, given the amount of images I’m working with. I’ll practice reading the poems with the soundtrack on the weekend and see how it goes. The way I see it at this point is that it is not a problem to take my time reading/performing the poems, and give the audience more time to absorb everything that’s going on. I’m thrilled to report that my new colleague Kok Siew Wai, who has been mentioned on this blog a few times, has agreed to perform with me during the Malaysia poems. This is great news!! She’ll be accentuating the soundtracks with her kazoos, didgeridoo, mbira, and perhaps other instruments, and if I finish reading before a track is finished, I can join Siew Wai improvising along with the soundtracks. We had a good meeting today, where I outlined my plan for the performance and she agreed to join in. Our gig at the gallery last week went well and the chemistry was nice, so I’m psyched that she’s going to be part of the show. This is why I spent time mixing the sounds, because I wanted to get the audio component to her before she went home to KL for the weekend. We’ll rehearse somewhere on Tuesday and give it our best shot on Wednesday…
Still a good bit of prep to do but things are shaping up nicely I think. Besides working on the details and tech-checking to finish out the week tomorrow I’ll finally (supposedly) be meeting with Keh Siong, the database tutor, and am hopeful that something will come of that as well. Clearly I have a bevy of new materials with which a database can be populated. Now the trick is to actually make it happen.
I also managed to work on the audio tracks today, and mixed together all of the soundtracks I want to use (5, four with poems) in the Malaysia set. What I discovered is that the set is rather long—perhaps 10 minutes longer than I expected—but maybe that’s OK, given the amount of images I’m working with. I’ll practice reading the poems with the soundtrack on the weekend and see how it goes. The way I see it at this point is that it is not a problem to take my time reading/performing the poems, and give the audience more time to absorb everything that’s going on. I’m thrilled to report that my new colleague Kok Siew Wai, who has been mentioned on this blog a few times, has agreed to perform with me during the Malaysia poems. This is great news!! She’ll be accentuating the soundtracks with her kazoos, didgeridoo, mbira, and perhaps other instruments, and if I finish reading before a track is finished, I can join Siew Wai improvising along with the soundtracks. We had a good meeting today, where I outlined my plan for the performance and she agreed to join in. Our gig at the gallery last week went well and the chemistry was nice, so I’m psyched that she’s going to be part of the show. This is why I spent time mixing the sounds, because I wanted to get the audio component to her before she went home to KL for the weekend. We’ll rehearse somewhere on Tuesday and give it our best shot on Wednesday…
Still a good bit of prep to do but things are shaping up nicely I think. Besides working on the details and tech-checking to finish out the week tomorrow I’ll finally (supposedly) be meeting with Keh Siong, the database tutor, and am hopeful that something will come of that as well. Clearly I have a bevy of new materials with which a database can be populated. Now the trick is to actually make it happen.
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:22 AM 
