Initial drawings, designs and research images showed fairly visceral, gross depictions of eating or food. However, through our interview process we found out what images and noises would and wouldn’t be appropriate to include and created some concept art accordingly. Despite initial ideas of showing misophonia triggering imagery and sounds (which could provide an intensely immersive film) within our animation, we decided to include noises that were regarded as pleasant or soothing – pink noise (similar to white noise) would become the backing track to the soundscape; filling the gaps between talking and creating a base level of noise. We felt this was necessary as we learnt that ‘silence is the enemy’ as it can allow unpleasant noises space to be heard. Initial imagery and ideas below
Unanimously we decided that we wanted colourful, saturated imagery with a lot going on. The idea being that this would provide a visual noise to echo preoccupation/fixation on sound without actually having to include the misophonia triggering sounds. Some of the drawings above illustrate this nicely through the variation in texture; this came to influence the look of the final film. Though we decided to use stop motion collage techniques for the most part due to time restrictions, we stuck to the idea of a texturally rich and diverse film; using various fabrics and materials to create each scene.
With over an hour of recordings; it was difficult to extract a narrative thread that would run for less than 5 minutes. But after transcripting the interviews, we were able to see some similarities in the content and could break them into sections which we sat down with and discussed how they could piece together. I edited the audio together in audition – I don’t have much experience of sound design so this was a challenge, but we were able to overcome the ‘choppiness’ created by the cuts between different qualities of recordings by using an aural backdrop of pink noise. This worked nicely with the references to ‘liquid rising up’ and white noise as well as making the viewer aware of the presence of a relentless noise; just as someone with misophonia might.
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