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Please, I've kind of got some slides to show you and I'm just going to flick through them
and talk about them.
If you have any questions you want to ask, it's absolutely fine to interrupt, so go ahead.
So this is, yeah, and I, for the first time, was a collaboration.
I worked with Dr. Jamie Ward from the University of Sussex and it was a commission for the Welcome
Trust who are an amazing organisation in the UK who, I think the guy who set it up just
made a bundle of money and then didn't have any children to leave it to, so instead he
set up this charity for biomedical science and they have a very small amount of their
very enormous budget, which is for arts awards, but they are very generous and kind and I
love them forever and also I want to get some more money from them in the future.
Oh, now you're recording it, damn it.
So, yeah, so I was really interested in the subject and Jamie was incredibly helpful.
We did have a project before this called Cynesthesia and Sound, which was a research and development
project, so all in all this, my kind of work on Cynesthesia was about five years.
And this is, this first slide we have here is Tessa, one of the people that we worked
with and this was her visualization of her week.
So if you have colour days of the week, that's kind of, it's the most common form of Cynesthesia,
but I don't want to say common because that makes it sound like it's not a good thing
and it's an amazing thing to have any kind of Cynesthesia, so don't feel bad.
My husband actually has this kind of, when I first started working on Cynesthesia, he
said, everybody has colour days of the week and I said, oh sweetheart, you're Cynesthesia,
oh no, I'm not, I'm pregnant.
But so this is how Tessa remembers the week and it's really, I think this is kind of interesting
and it shows how Cynesthesia can have a really good memory of where they are in space and
time, yeah.
Can I just ask you a question about that?
Yeah, sure, of course.
Is it the same all the time for them or does it depend on their frame of mind and to what
colour?
No, it's one of the kind of defining factors of Cynesthesia is that it's always the same.
It's not always the same for everybody, but for that one person, that will always be the
same and if you want to do a totally unscientific test on whether you're Cynesthetic or not,
write down what colours you think the days of the week are or the letters of the alphabet
or whatever draws you and then put it away in a sealed envelope and then in your diary
make a note a few months time to do it again, do it again and then open the envelope and
compare the two.
If you're like me and you're not Cynesthetic, those two documents will have a kind of random
kind of correlation that there might be say 40% similarity between them, but if you're
Cynesthetic, the correlation will be something like 90%, it will be ridiculously similar
because it's not something that can be altered, which is kind of really fascinating to those
of us who aren't like that.
I've got pictures of my collaborators, this is Julie, I was saying earlier to Alice that
one of the interesting things about Cynesthetic is that Cynesthesia is often the least interesting
thing about them.
Julie is amazing, she's a professional musician, she prays the oboe because she likes to look
at the music it plays, she hates the cello at any kind of stringed instrument because
she thinks they all look like poo, like literally I've animated some of her cello notes and
they're just all scatological, it's horrible.
She's an animal rights activist for shellfish, which was on the first day I met her, I nearly
went to Mark's and Spencer bought her some prawn sandwiches, so lucky I didn't do that.
Trying to be nice, hospitality.
This is Tessa, she's a stained glass window artist, another incredible, she also farms
and she's just a beautiful character.
She was wonderful to work with because being a stained glass window artist, she's very
easily kind of able to explain her Cynesthesia to me, which made it very easy to transfer,
but she also has a lot of metallic in her Cynesthesia, so lots of it required a metally
look which I found really hard to translate to the screen.
This is Emma, she's a writer, she writes actually my local newspaper, she's also totally separately,
she has a really unfortunate condition which means that her, it's kind of like a really
aggressive form of arthritis although she's only in her 30s, she's already in a wheelchair,
but despite this she's flown around the UK single-handed in a light aircraft.
See what I mean?
Cynesthesia is not the most interesting thing about any of these people.
The film really attempts just to kind of like show from the inside out what it's like to
have Cynesthesia.
I chose this slide as an example, Tessa did this painting, you can see at the top there,
which is a harp playing a sound which you would have heard throughout the film, and
it's not a very good image because when she made it it was wet and it was really important
to her, the wetness of it kind of had a big impact on how it looked, so I have to sort
of make notes about this and she used the metallic paint, so I had to try and transfer
this into a moving image, into something digital.
All my work is made digitally, so although it kind of has a hand-painted look to it and
a hand-made look, I actually draw everything into a computer with a graphics tablet.
But despite that I did have to kind of like go outside of my comfort zone and start scanning
in glitter and playing with tin foil and things in order just to kind of try and convey what
it was that they see in order to do it properly.
The way we used to kind of like capture their experiences was I used Munsell colour charts
to ask them to pick out the colours, so it's kind of like a scientific, it's supposed to
be every colour, although many people with synesthesia told me the colours weren't in
there.
They did drawings and paintings with various different materials and I had to buy kind
of whole different art sets for each different people, Tessa was a lot of glitter paint,
and also I recorded their voices as they listened to the sound, so I played them like a selection
of about 30 everyday sounds, all of which were kind of then used in the soundtrack and
given to the composer, and then that's what they captured.
It was tricky trying to do this, working collaboratively, once I'd recorded all the
sounds and I'd got all their reactions and I kind of did, first of all did a digital
still of each reaction and sent it to them and said is this right, and they said no,
and I said okay, and then I sent them another one and another one and another one, and then
eventually we kind of got to the stage where I could do a moving image so I could animate
it, because animation is 25 frames a second, you really don't want to have to animate anything
you don't know how to do.
So once I'd done that, we'd done that with the individual sounds and I'd gotten them
all right, then I started working with the composer and kind of putting the soundtracks
together, and as you can tell it's kind of a very multi-layered thing.
I played them sections of the soundtrack that we had done which included their voices, and
so this is a painting that Emma made of part of the soundtrack that she'd heard, it kind
of changed it, I don't know if people with synesthesia kind of appreciate this, but if
you hear like a sound individually it has a different look to when it's a sound in conjunction
with other sounds, they change each other, the same way that like a letter might be a
colour but then when it's in a word it sort of might change the colour that it is.
So this is part of it then in a screenshot, in the top, oh I'm not very good at the left
and right, top left hand corner, you've got those kind of like Michael Jackson steps I
called them in my head, which were these kind of like sort of semi-circles as it was a piano
note kind of change going down and that's how she saw those moving, and then you've
got the harp in the background, the grey scribbles is the sound of static and the kind of thing
that look like knobbly sticks, they are the sound of frogs croaking, but as they played
at different sort of timbres they change colour for her, so those were particularly kind of
matte and purple and green.
Okay, so some of the reactions were really straightforward and they were really easy
to assimilate to the film, so this is Tessa painting the sound of a police siren, which
obviously you'd recognise from the film that was fairly straightforward to put forward.
Other things were just really hard, people who have spinacesia very often it's not entirely
a clear cut which of their senses are intermingled, a couple of times I had experiences when I
was interviewing people when they would say, well this is Emma's pan scourer, so she was
trying to explain the sound to me and what it looked like and she couldn't do it and
in the end she went to the kitchen, she came back with a pan scourer and she said it's
like this, I thought she meant the colour but she meant the texture, so another time
I was interviewing Tessa and she was trying to explain a high silvery sound to me and
she couldn't do it and in the end she reached over and she just stroked my arm very lightly
and said it's like that, I was like that's great, I don't know what you mean.
But for them it's kind of you know, it's all mixed up together and then also when I played
the soundtrack when it had the voices instead of when I sort of went back and said okay
now we've got all the sounds sorted out, here's the soundtrack and they told me, but
then when it had voices in, graphene's kind of made an entrance, so this is Tessa starting
to say well there's words, all these words in it, all these words have got their own
colours and I said actually we might leave the words out, is that okay?
Because it just would have overwhelmed the entire film, it would have taken away everything
else just because those are so dominating and so this was her beginning just to sort
of like try to illustrate the soundtrack and before we realised we'd both go bonkers.
And yeah this is just to still, at the end of the film, it's meant to be, the film is
kind of structured in a sort of three act thing, it's meant to be very, very sort of
roughly somebody with synesthesia going to the city, it was interesting, all the people
I spoke to and I interviewed lots of people about synesthesia and certainly all the three
women who took part in this film, they all lived in the country and they didn't like
the city and they said if they go into shops for this too much music they'll walk out.
You know it seems to be quite a common thing, not wanting to be over stimulated because
over stimulation didn't just mean like oh I've got a headache, it meant oh my god my
head's going to explode, there's so much going on here, you know it's like really full on.
So the ending was kind of meant to sort of indicate that, like it's so much stimulation
and Tessa's like I really like silence, you know, let's finish now, stop the film, stop
the film.
Okay, so yeah, doing this project was really interesting, I really love collaborating with
the people, I really enjoyed sort of bringing people into the film and allowing them to
alter the inside of the film, I think I make animated documentaries, that's kind of what
I've specialised in which is a bit of an odd thing to do anyway, I know, but more than
that I think what animation can do in a documentary sense is to kind of invite people into the
frame and not just say okay I'm going to video you and then I'm going to go away for six
months and I'm going to come back and show you the finished product, it's sort of saying
actually I can invite you into the frame and you can change it and you can do stuff and
you can do drawings and they can go in as well.
So then I, like an idiot, started a PhD on the subject and that's what I'm doing at the
moment, I've finished the Aniflif Sound obviously but now as Kieran mentioned I'm doing work
about prosopagnosia which is face blindness and phantom limb syndrome and trying to translate
those onto the screen as to see if my theory, my cunning plan, about how you can invite
people into an image and how you can invite people into a film and collaborate together
on it through animation, kind of extends or changes or subverts the documentary genre
in some way, so that's my current thing and that's it.
