VCA Production Puppetry Solos 2008

VCA Production – Puppetry Solos 2008 – “Raw Material” - June 2008
Just over two years ago, The Victorian College of the Arts School of Production established a Post Graduate Degree in Puppetry. Since then the degree has grown and gathered strong support from the Arts Industry, in fostering the development of Puppetry as a performance art.

The course this year is home to 5 puppeteers, Sabrina D’Angelo, Gai Anderson, Rachel Guy, Lisa Foote and Iris Radovic. The 5 puppeteers are an extremely diverse group of people with a wide range of backgrounds, a very large age range and varying interests. My work on the project was as Sound Designer for Sabrina D’Angelo’s and Gai Anderson’s pieces.

Sabrina D’Angelo

Introduction
Sabrina’s piece told the story of a lonely character dropped into an unfamiliar world, and his search for companionship and happiness. It involved the creation of a strange barren, alien landscape incorporating a wide range of different objects, ranging from tin cans to used condoms. The piece had an important flow as a story, it started with adventure, then moved to fun with a companion, then to obsession, then a character building affection, then intimate interaction, which ultimately led to murder and the remorse felt after committing such an act.

Working with Sabrina
One of the first things that Sabrina and I worked on in the piece was the way in which we wanted the audience to feel. We studied the difference in emotions of the different scenes and agreed that each scene needed to be to the point and naturalistic.We both felt that we needed to introduce the audience into the world that Fin (the main character) had been dropped into. As Sabrina and I had broken down the piece into sections and allocated each section an emotion, I set to work to source the different tracks we would use. Sabrina has already decided on her final track, a song by Damien Rice called Cold Cold Water. It featured strong lyrics
and a stirring musical accompaniment. For this reason I chose not to use spoken work in any other section of the piece.

The Sound Design
The first track was called “About Fun” by Psapp, a track that required heavy editing to take out all of the lyrics. It featured a great bopping beat with toy sound effects over the top. Sabrina enjoyed playing with the characters in that track and happily described it as almost sounding like a Hello Kitty Orgy. The Second track was also by Psapp and called Always in my head. This
track also required heavy editing to take out the lyrics, but featured a very flowing obsessive drumbeat alongside an electronic gurgle. It perfectly represented the scene where the character is drawn to a dummy like object thet he receives pleasure from. This tracks drum beat was faded out when the other girl character entered, but the electronic gurgle remained as a lingering reminder of the dummy.

The gurgle discretely faded into the intimacy of a track called Upstairs, also by Psapp. This track used Foley of creaking floors and footsteps to create the beat alongside a toy xylophone and a wallowing trumpet. This track was also stripped of its vocals. This section of the piece was the most important part as it led to the confusion of the main character and ultimately him losing control. At the end of the song, he gets carried away and is pushed back by his girl companion, this is where I included the use of static to create disorientation and drama. The track was played through an FM transmitted and tuned out on a standard FM radio, the output of which was recorded by a computer. This created an effective and realistic tuning out of the sound. The static was deliberately the loudest sound in the whole piece. This was included for two reasons; the first was that it was arguably the most important part of the piece, and second to give even more emphasis to the silence that followed it. The reason for the use of silence was to allow the character to connect with the audience and have the realisation of what he has done.

I believe that a stories most important part is its ending. The ending of a story usually provides a moral, a meaning or a resolution. Thus the use of our final track Cold, Cold Water, by Damien Rice. Not only is the dialogue in that song literal, as the character is surrounded by cold water, but the song tells the story of loss and isolation. The last track was edited to end on the sound of swelling chanting and an echo of inaudible words.

Gai Anderson (Click here to listen to final sound design)

Introduction
During the pre-production period Gai’s piece went through many changes, but the general premise never changed. Her piece told the story of a family, who had been happily living in a forest, until the introduction of the city, and the complications of money and possessions. This impacted on the family and as the environment changed, so did their daily lives. It followed the family’s son, and his relationship with his friend, the bird. With narration, and cute subtext the piece was very much a performed fairy tale or folk story, and with this came the challenge of creating a Soundscape that allowed for some imagination.

Working with Gai
It was decided that the piece would begin and end with ambient bird sounds, this was to put the audience in the scene of the piece and to give closure on the story. For this I used a combination of BBC Sound Library tracks and a track recorded by the puppeteer on her home
property. Ambient noise also played a large part in the body of the piece with the traffic sounds being layered over the top of each other. The music sourced for the piece was deliberately of a non emotive genre. The puppeteer originally described it as Gypsy music, but we narrowed that down to music that used no electronic instruments and that was instrumental.

The Sound Design
A Melbourne based band called The Band Who Knew Too Much were an ideal candidate due to their use of piano accordion, woodwind instruments and basic drum beats. Two of their tracks were used in the piece, Gypsy M.F. and Spinning Round and Round. The Spinning Round and Round track was editing to include only one introductory verse, and no chorus. This was due to the length of the music, and its importance in the piece.

Another prominent sound in the piece was the factory bell. The bell was designed to be the only electronically generated noise in the design so that it would stand out from the rest of the Soundscape. It was panned hard to the left of the speaker system to create an effect of distance. I created the track by generating a tone and then applying a series of delay and echo effects to it. It was designed to sound more like a fire alarm than a factory whistle.

The piece was designed to feature only two sections of silence. The first was the start of the narration, and this was intended to bring the audiences focus into the playing space after the environment ambience. The second is when the bird doesn’t return, and this is due to the importance of this scene as a catalyst for the boy to make the forest return. We return to the forest sounds including the bird whistle which is now included in the whole sound, not just from the side of stage.

Summary
Overall, the piece created worked very well with the sound design. It was a dangerous piece to design due to the relative ease of cheesy and over literal sound opportunities, but I believe the sound helped to tell the story and helped to connect the audience to the actions onstage.