A recent trip to France made me consider how I will audience my project. While rummaging around an old book shop in Dieppe, I came across books I’d read in childhood and occasionally still read now. These books, mainly in the form of graphic novels such as Tintin and Asterix. Considering these French versions from the ones in English. Whilst the font remains the same, the characteristics change quite dramatically. The familiar (visuals) combined with unfamiliar (text) added with nostalgia is an engaging mix. Anyway, for 5 Euros I brought old, first edition of Les Bijoux De Castafiore (The Castafiore Emerald) and attempted to read the book on the four-hour ferry journey back to New Haven. No chance! I ended up taking notes as I got thinking how my work would look should the narration in my project be translated.
The Castafiore Emerald (English title) Herge (1962)
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Putting ideas in practice. I have been working on a Pop-Art inspired rotoscope I Must Be Dreaming (2013). I made a few amendments. For a more vintage comic strip quality, I went from colour to a grainy black and white and included subtitles in French. Jonny (sound engineer), also working on the rotoscope, posted me some sampled audio. He quotes, “A dreamy clip of “Eros” by Piero Piccioni was edited and added, to underscore the fantasy and surrealism of the scene” On first impressions, I thought the recording didn’t differential much from the original so I tweaked it further, adding echo, tremerlo and truncated silences. I even spiced it up with a rattle snake sound bite! Sound bite notes from uploader on Freesounds.org
Rattle snake hissing or shaking its tail at variable pitches. Recorded with the Tascam DR-40 built-in microphones, processed in Pro Tools 10, bounced to a 48kHz 24bit WAV file.
Another rotoscope, the jazzy, Make-up also got a face lift. Here Jonny adds two edits from Sun Ra’s When Sun Comes Out, to make a soundtrack. The first edit features percussion and upright bass and the second a piano chord. Other than amplification, I’ve not made any amendments.
Make-up (2013)
