Miranda Whall

Well what a day – I’m almost too tired to write but will honour the necessity and duty to update the blog by putting down something brief here…

John Davies and Hannah Vallin from the Pwllpeiran Upland Centre took me, Hannah, Rhys and Ben (Rhys’s camera operator) up to a track where Gareth the farmer had penned in some sheep to see if we could get some footage for Rhys’s documentary film on my project.

What a strange and unique experience, being so close and down on their level, they were jumpy of course and I was a little nervous, one came up close to sniff me and check me out, I thought more would follow but didn’t, they were less edgy when I stopped looking at them in the eye but still they kept their distance.

We didn’t quite get the shots we had imagined, John, Gareth and the dog couldn’t get the sheep to walk either side of me but I think Ben got some great footage on the DJI Ronin camera.

What beautiful beautiful faces, so clean and white and lots of fresh bright eyes, and all those legs, a forest of legs, ahh I love sheep even more now..

I had a new mouth mount for the Go Pro Hero 5 – it made me gag a lot at first, like a snorkel or dental X-ray, but I got used to it, I love it, it makes me feel and look more strange, more removed from a human being, a little more like something else, possibly a little more animal – a platypus? it is closer to my body than any of the other cameras, partly, almost inside my body, so blurring the line between me and the landscape further.

Had lots of clarity today as well through talking to Hannah, as usual, thank goodness for Hannah, I don’t have any conversations about the work with anyone else, apart from Reuben Knutson my creative mentor on the project, so when I talk to her I think aloud and always make some headway.

I now think I want to combine edited Go Pro footage with un- edited footage into a series of 6 – 8 minute films, the question for a few weeks has been whether I should let the footage play out as it was captured, honouring a truth to process approach and real time or edit the footage to sync with the sound across multiple synced screens, a combination of both now feels like the best way forward. When I complete the route I will have done 8 crawls, so it feels sensible to have eight chapters: eight films, eight musical compositions (which means commissioning 3 more), eight pieces of text and poems etc.

I’ve also had new ideas about the publication – its layout and content..

So a good day – a bit of re- focussing and only one more crawl to go.

Thank you Hannah Mann for the stunning photographs, John, Hannah and Gareth for setting up the sheep and Rhys and Ben for filming.