The last day of the conference had two highlights for me.
The first highlight was a reading from Deborah Klika’s screenplay Czech in the Rear View Mirror. I have known Deborah since 2023 and I know that she is proud of her Czech roots. Her screenplay is the story of her parents, who emigrated to Australia. The table read of the script was a great experience, partly because it was funny, but mainly because Deborah found Czechs living in Adelaide to play the two main characters. In addition, two other ladies from the Czech club in Adelaide came to the reading. After the reading, I had the opportunity to talk to them and it was nice to hear their stories, in varying degrees of Czech language recall.
The second highlight of the day was a presentation by Alicia Butterworth. Alicia is a sound designer and she talked about how they developed and created the VR experience We Were Children Once about Holocaust survivors. I consider it the best paper of the entire conference. Alicia was able to introduce us to the details of a sound designer’s work in preparing VR and concluded her talk with a set of recommendations for VR creators. Among the recommendations were the following regarding directing the audience’s attention in 360 degrees:
– Involve sound from pre-prod – we can help direct attention.
– VR is overwhelming for the audience – attention cues need to be significantly more obvious (louder/more present) to affect the audience than in traditional disciplines.
Sound designers therefore think about attention quite consciously. This reminded me of James Cutting’s observation that filmmakers are great psychologists. This is probably even more true of sound designers. There were two contributions from sound designers at the conference, and both showed that they think about audiences quite differently from screenwriters. From screenwriters at the conference, I heard mainly reflections on the diversity of audiences and the impossibility of generalizing about them. Sound designers approach this from the opposite angle—from perception—and thus have a quite different idea of audiences based on shared sensory experience.
That’s all from this year’s conference, and see you next time in Oxford!
SNAPlab 