Road to 2012 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery- Yuval Gerstein & Cristina Picchi

Under Your Skin– Yuval Gerstein & Cristina Picchi’s audio visual project premiered last night at The National Portrait Gallery as part of an exhibition called Road to 2012. The short film was screened as part of Late shift extra: Re Animate event:

Under your skin – Yuval Gerstein and Cristina Picchi

“This immersive audio-visual project sets out to explore carefully chosen Olympic sports from a fresh angle. We are capturing portraits of local London-based athletes and revealing a world which sports fans do not normally have access to in television broadcasts and interviews. We have explored three very different but complementary moments during their training – preparation, participation and rest.” (Words about the project taken from the roadto2012 wbesite)

National Portrait Gallery Theater

Under your skin- Screening at the National Portrait Gallery

Late shit extra: Re Animate . The national portrait gallery. August 6th 2011

Martyn Ware and Yuval Gerstein

Press

Here is coverage of the piece on Italy’s biggest newspaper – La Republica

Goldsmiths University press release , September 2011-

http://www.gold.ac.uk/news/pressrelease/?releaseID=906

The project

    The project is part of a participation project with Goldsmiths university where I am currently finishing my MA in creative practice and Cristina is studying Documentary film making.

“Goldsmiths students were challenged to respond to a live brief set by the artists ( commissioned-photographer Brian Griffin, sound artist Martyn Ware and Goldsmiths tutor Julian Hendriques) and presented their proposals before an ‘X Factor’ style judging panel critique in spring 2011.”  The roadto2012 wbesite

Repton boys club

Cristina and I basically presented two different projects but in the turn of events the judges proposed that we join our talents and work together on a joint project. We were pretty amazed and we did not know each other at all but we both agreed and we’re both ever so happy that we did.

After weeks of filming, conceptualizing and countless hours of editing, the film was screened to at the National Portrait Gallery’s theater last night in the presence of curators , artists, friends and families  of the athletes who participated in the project and the general public.

    During the filming for the project, film maker Cristina Picchi and I went around east London and documented local athletes at their training grounds. The concept was to show angles of each sport that you don’t normally see. Cristina was filming the athletes with an HD camera and then let them train in their sports while wearing a Gopro camera and capturing their experience from a subjective point of view.

Recording the sounds

Recording Wheelchair Rugby

The sounds of each venue were recorded, the ambiance, the athlete’s sounds and also used a binaural recording technique using a small recorder with a special binaural recording kit. This basically means that you can capture the experience of a person from a subjective point of hearing and when played back on head phones the results could be extraordinary, like in this famous example of the virtual barber shop.

Equipment used to record the sounds :

* M-audio micro Track II with a Binaural microphone headset.

* Marantz PMD661 Professional Portable Field Recorder

* AUDIO-TECHNICA BP4029 Stereo Shotgun Microphone.

      During filming we split in two as Cristina was filming the athlete and the venue and I went around recording it and then interviewing the athlete to capture some of his/her thoughts about his sport.

The editing process was long and after Cristina came up with her brilliant editing of the videos I had to create the sounds and sound scape of the experience by using the sounds I had recorded. It was an interesting job and reminded me of my work on animation films where you sometimes need to be spot on the action and sometimes you can get more creative and create something that is a bit more surreal.

We originally filmed lots of different sports such as Tennis, Mountain cycling, Water polo, Fencing and many others and eventually we chose the sports for the final film based on the footage we had and our conceptual idea for the final product.

Recording Wheelchair Rugby

We met many wonderful, lovely people who agreed to let us into their world and shared their experience of the sports they love.We would like to thank them and let them know how much we appreciate their help on making this project happen. We would also like to thank Goldsmiths university and the National Portrait Gallery for this opportunity and faith they had in us throughout.