Notes on Blindness

I first heard this story as a radio piece on 360 Documentaries and was blown away by how great it was. Then a friend sent me this New York Times video version which I also love. It combines audio diaries from a man who documented his experience of going blind, with beautifully crafted film images and archival style reenactments. The story behind the making of this piece is here.

I’m a huge fan of audio diaries and the intimate and reflective space they can create, and I think in this case, the audio works really well with images.  It’s a sad piece, but the final part is so beautiful that I don’t think I’ll ever listen to the rain the same way again…..

“rain brings out the contours of what’s around you. In that it introduces a continuous blanket of differentiated and specialised sound, uninterrupted, which fills the whole of the audible environment…..If only there could be something equivalent to the falling of rain inside, then the whole of a room would take on shape and dimension”

 

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360 Documentaries internship

I’ve been doing an internship with ABC Radio National’s 360 Documentaries program and they broadcast some of my work on the weekend.

I’ve been producing audio monologues from 360’s Pocketdocs competition. The competition asked listeners to submit a 500-word piece on the theme ‘a secret revealed’. I chose 5 stories from the finalists and invited the writers into their nearest ABC studio to read and record their story. I then edited the recordings, added some music and sound FX, and did the final sound mix with Andrei Shabonuv, one of the ABC’s amazing sound engineers. It was so much fun collaborating on these pieces and giving a sound life to written works.

The first piece to be broadcast is Collateral Damage, a whimsical tale of two warring sisters that reminded me a bit of my own childhood memories and sisters antics. This is a picture of the writer Ruth Wyer and her sister when they were young. They came into the ABC’s Sydney studio and we had heaps of fun recording their story.

Ruth and Maureen on Bikes - web Copy