The Listening Place6 mins colour widescreen PAL stereo A First Take Production for Anglia Television The Listening Place is an impressionistic and visionary diary of a single working day in Cambridge market place. From dawn until dusk it observes the changing rhythms of human activity, framed by the fountain, shop facades and rows of stalls. Many sequences adopts a matting device which combines two or more time windows into the framed space. Each window shows us a different charged moment in the day. My intention was to devise a unique method for distilling out these dramatic moments from 20 hours of recorded material. As we observe the market place, there might be four different windows interacting, creating the illusion that all these events are happening simultaneously. Time lapse was used to create a visual contrast between the personal and public spaces occupied within the frame. The woman eating her lunch seemed lost in quiet reverie, oblivious to the surrounding hubbub of city activity. The blackbird settling on the fountain cues the small child to hunt for her father, lost in the crowd. A range of digital filters were employed to transform photographic reality into painterly and gestural forms. The result attempts to integrate the formal concerns of painting, animation and observational documentary. Ed Kelly's soundtrack adopts the strategems of electro acoustic sound design to build a soundscape from the ambient sounds of the market. This soundscape traces the changing moods and acoustic qualities of the space, combining the intimate with the panoramic. This mood is counterpointed by a simple musical theme: four harmonic bass guitar tones, constantly reiterated and developed through digital processing.
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