Less than three weeks until the Artlands Dubbo festival program kicks off now and we’re in the fine-tuning stage of my work, Volucres.
The creative team met each other for the first time at the Fire Station Arts Centre in Dubbo this week. Until now the sound and the video have been developed independently, which meant my sound guy (Wez Thompson) and video guy (Peter Aland) hadn’t met each other, despite moving in similar circles.
On Wednesday morning we spent almost two hours hooking up speakers and receivers (thanks to my roadie/photographer, GG Porteous), trying to work out how to connect a projector and DVD player through the receiver (which proved to be unsuccessful due to a missing cable), and walking around the space with serious looks on our faces, tuning our ears to individual speakers and the overall sound (which gets really loud and busy in the middle) – listening to the 5 minute track, over and over and over again.
I’m not sure our facial expressions really expressed just how much we were enjoying the process of seeing this work finally come together.
There’s still plenty to do in light of deciding this week that the speakers need to be mounted up high in the space; knowing we have three short-throw projector rentals arriving less than a week out from the opening yet to be tested with three borrowed Blu-ray players (still to be rounded up)…and the three-channel video still needs some work.
The creative bit is almost truly over in the creation of Volucres…now it’s problem-solving tech stuff and publicity. While I wait for speaker mounts to arrive by mail and the projectors to be delivered, I need to get the Volucres story out to the general public and not just to my intimate group of followers. It has all felt a bit surreal to have reinvented this work over the past six months and to actually be in the festival program, so I guess it’s time to tell the whole glorious story.
Volucres at Artlands 2016, 27-30 October, 12 noon – 5pm, Holy Trinity Hall, Dubbo NSW
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