Miranda Whall

Cloud and rain, rain and cloud, cloud and rain…

We parked under the wind turbine instead of carrying up on the track, which is great because now we have found out that I can drive my car up there instead of hiring a 4 x 4.

I said ” you two walk up with me to find the gate where I finished the first crawl on Wednesday, so I can meet you there after I’ve done the second crawl today”, but we couldn’t find the gate. I gave up looking for it and instead started trying to find our way back to the car, we came to another gate, a different one, which we all failed to recognise we had recently passed through. At this gate I said “the car is this way” and marched ahead confident in my sense of direction, then after some minutes….time had by then abandoned us, we realised we were totally lost, there were no landmarks and we had no idea where we were or which direction the car was in, at which point we also realised we had no food or drink, wobbly legs and Hannah didn’t have her green poncho!. After some time Hannah said “lets try and get back to the gate” because in the opposite direction to the one we had gone, there was a track. We found it and indeed that track led us, in a few minutes, back to the car! Well done Hannah, not so well done me!

We abandoned filming, it was too dangerous.

But while talking to Hannah in the car on the return to Aberystwyth (which has become an essential part of the development of this project) three things became clear;

I need to buy a GPS and learn to use a compass so that we can work more safely in these weather conditions.

I need to allow Hannah and Destina to be in the Go Pro footage so that instead of having to do the crawl twice – once on my own for the Go Pro footage and a second time to re- enact the crawl for the sake of the film footage, we would all do it together – authentically – once – this would be a more truthful process.

We also realised it would interesting if Hannah and Destina, if now authentically part of the performance, also played with various cameras i.e various perspectives and less conventional approaches to filming. This would allow them to get closer to my experience and work more intuitively, for example Destina could film with a Go Pro camera – if less hindered by the weather conditions she could be more responsive and spontaneous to what was unfolding, and Hannah had the idea of attaching lots of pin hole cameras (film canisters) to her body while also using her iphone, SLR and a range of obsolete analogue cameras.

So even though the crawl was aborted the day was very productive in getting another step closer to the conceptual core of the project, if there is such a thing?.

very very short film:

IMG_1482-2 Phone film by Destina Bartley