MEDI 127 (Sound and Image Project Critical Evaluation)

Our Film ‘A pebble love story’ is a tragedy about, well, pebbles. The basic Idea was to have a stop motion animation where we used googly eyes and marker pens on pebbles to effect emotion on the pebbles. My particular inspiration for this came from a picture where people had put faces on fruit and made a story out of them, the way this was done made it very emotive and I thought If we followed a similar tack we would be fairly successful in our aims.

However the actualities of filming were very different. We had very limited equipment as there were no tripods available in the hub and all the best cameras had been taken.  Also trying to hold a camera steady in the wind is a tricky thing to so it’s not quite stop motion. Also we couldn’t use markers to draw faces on as it would not have been logistically possible since for the most part it was raining....

The actual filming took place on location at a beach and it was freezing cold and also very windy. This made sound recording hard since the wind distorted the sounds and they are nowhere near as crisp as we would have liked. The pebbles ‘voices’ however were recorded later and sound much better. 

We had the idea of making little squeaky kind of noises to add to the comedic effect of the piece, as without the humour it is fairly sad.  The ‘voice’ noises worked in achieving a comedic effect I feel and in particular made the ‘pebble sex’ scene funnier. Originally we were toying with the idea of having sounds of pebbles hitting one another or making some form of cheesy 80’s porno sound track for it but I think what we went with was funnier.

It’s not as good as I would have hoped and next time I would like to have had better and more equipment. It would have been nicer with a warmer place to film but the location and the weather add so much to the film I feel as the grey and cold looking beach adds to the sombre tone that we wished to create.