S.O.S. Initial Idea

Today I had a meeting with Amy to discuss possible ideas and story for our project ‘Sense of Space’. Because we did similar tranquil pieces with our previous project ‘Portrait of Place’ we both agreed very quickly that we wanted to go down a different route and capture sounds or create a story that captures a lot of noise & carnage & make it almost too much for the ears.

After a few discussions of possible ideas we decided that we would like to capture the sense of stress & anger in the workplace. Our chosen workplace would set place in a restaurant kitchen. The moods we want to capture are stress, panic, chaos & anger. Luckily I know of someone that works as a Head Chef in a restaurant so I will ask if it is ok to make the piece in his kitchen workplace. If not due to the kitchen being too busy or health & safety risks Amy & I will ask to enter the kitchen for a short while just to make notes of the different sounds & get an understanding of how a kitchen works.

  Just to be safe that we are not allowed to make our ‘Sense of Space’ in the restaurant kitchen Amy & I created a fictionalized rough script for the project with details of sound effects & what order they go in but also the narrative of the Chef’s & Waiter who work at the restaurant (to give a simple idea of what we both are looking for). So therefore it will be a fictional ‘Sense of Space’ but based on real situations that happen in kitchens, hopefully this will come through successfully as we try to re-create the mood. We both decided that we will use my kitchen with a number of different microphones placed around different spots in the kitchen to capture as many different sounds & sound effects as possible.

 Amy & I also created a list of films we should research that have kitchen scenes in them to research the way they capture sound. These films include:
The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover
Ratatouille
Julie & Julia

We also together made a list of sounds we would expect to capture in a kitchen and placed these into the scripts in certain stages as well:

- Chef’s talking and giving orders

- Knives being sharpened

- Clanging of pots

- Cutlery moving

- Pots being washed in sink

- Boiled water bubbling in pots

- Sizzle in pans of oil & food

- Radio in background (have to be careful of copyright infringement)

- Plates being broken and clattering together

- Orders being made from waiter

- Slicing & preparing of food

(These sounds will be repeated over & over & then layered on top of each other to create a sense of chaos, the volume levels on certain sounds will also be heightened & lowered at certain times so the audience can focus & distinguish what sounds they are hearing throughout).