1. Introduction

2. Protocols and coordinates

3. Three maker practices

4. Marie's account of process

5. Martin's account of process

6. Alan's account of process

7. Reflective discussion

8. Conclusion

9. References & acknowledgements

Alan’s account of process

As described above, ‘Men Shouting’ deals with three films on the 2008 financial crash, each treated separately and in combination in the seven episodes (plus coda) of the video essay, while each of these episodes was composed based on different constraints. These sets of constraints are derived from various sources, including experimental literature, such as the work of the Oulipo group (Terry 2019), and the parametric exercises used to teach videographic criticism at the Scholarship in Sound and Image workshops run annually at Middlebury College (Keathley and Mittell 2019). I had already completed drafts of several episodes of ‘Men Shouting’ before 3WI: I decided to work with Martin on episode five, already substantially developed, and to work with Marie on episode seven, for which I had collected, but not elaborated, materials.

Developing Men Shouting episode 5 with Martin

Meeting 1

I showed Martin a draft of ‘Men Shouting’ episode five, which combines financial vocabulary and the names of financial organisations from the films The Big Short and Too Big To Fail (video clip). The idea was to compose an absurdist and paradoxically unenlightening glossary.

At nine minutes, the draft was far too long, and my goals were to make the episode shorter and to give it a greater ‘musicality’ (whether in terms of the treatment of the dialogue used, or of the overall shape of the episode).

Constraint set:

1. Think song structure in which there are ‘verses’ and ‘chorus’. 

Meeting 2

I was able to chop two minutes off the episode duration and formed what I thought of as ‘verses’ from financial terms, while a notional ‘chorus’ was formed from organisation names, divided into distinct alphabetic chunks (video clip).

The discussion circled around the following questions. Once again, (how) could the material be rendered more ‘musical’? Should the alphabetised chunks of glossary terms overlap? Could/should the individual glossary chunks be interspersed with the other episodes of the video essay? Might there be an advantage to eliminating images and restricting certain chunks to audio only?

Constraints set:

1. Intersperse audio chunks from the glossary (no images) throughout the video essay. 
2. Make episode five a sort of musical ‘solo’: a discrete and possibly ‘discordant’ section that ‘leaves the main “narrative” and plays to its sentiment only’ (Martin’s description of a solo). 

Meeting 3

I began by showing examples of the interspersing of audio chunks from the glossary, originally part of episode five, in other parts of the video essay, and two new versions of episode five (now retitled): one audio only (the ‘solo’), and a second that accompanied the audio with a mosaic screen I knew to be excessive.

Martin probed the purpose and importance for me of the musical metaphor of the ‘solo’ and idea of mimicking song structure. I explained that I had several notional musical points of reference for ‘Men Shouting’: songs such as The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ (1966) or The Fall’s ‘Paint Work’ (1985) represented things like a particular attitude to structure or a given sonic ‘feel’, respectively, which I hoped to emulate in the video essay as a whole or in certain of its parts. Martin’s guidelines for developing the work were couched as questions rather than imperatives, as follows.

Constraints set:

1. Episode five audio and images

• Could the dynamics of solos in music that you find inspiring inform the dynamics of the audio of section five?
• How would the resultant changes influence whether and what images should accompany the sound?
• How can the images help to give structure to the ‘solo’?

2. The interruptive glossary sections

• Where should these be placed?
• Should they be treated similarly or identically, or should the treatment evolve? If the latter, what should be the logic of change?

Meeting 4

I found it hard to make the dynamics of my section five ‘solo’ follow an existing piece of music because it felt to me that the piece already had its own distinctive musicality (‘prosody’ might be a better term). But working with Martin’s questions encouraged me to compress the sequence even more for intensity or variation in pace, and to introduce (brief) moments of silence.

I played the audio composition that I had arrived at, explaining that the story of the Lehman Brothers collapse was the centrepiece and climax of the ‘solo’, and that I had constructed a ‘chord’ — a choral bark made up of ten voices — to emphasise the name Lehman when it was enunciated in the dialogue outside the main Lehman section.

I chose to place the glossary interruption chunks according to several criteria: to replace female voices (suppressed in the video essay until the coda); to separate episodes; to emphasise moments of contrast or similarity. I later decided that the treatment of the glossary interruptions did not need to evolve across the video essay, with the exception of the credits at the end, the only time the interruption is accompanied by text.

Beyond the 3WI project, I added visuals in a split screen format, and the video clip shows the final published form taken by the episode (O’Leary 2023).

Developing Men Shouting episode 7 with Marie

Meeting 1

The plan for episode seven of ‘Men Shouting’ was to combine elements from all three films in a kind of toxic masculine crescendo. My initial idea was to forge a fictional link across the three films by showing characters speaking on telephones as if in conversation and I had already collected phone scenes from the three films on the editing timeline. Dialogue with Marie helped me to recall other moments in the video essay in which phones appear and raised the possibility of a focus on objects rather than characters. This appealed to me because men in cinema are often connoted by their proximity to or deployment of objects (e.g. weapons, cars, and computers — and phones).

Constraints set:

1. Focus on the telephone (not man). 
2. Keep the phone at the centre of the frame — or at least keep it seen. 
3. Consider the question: can following these constraints reveal blind spots in the project, or aspects of the films previously invisible?

Meeting 2

To centre the phone objects, I used dynamic stripes to segment the screen. This recalled the angular lines of share index diagrams and was technically challenging. The material was short, so I thought of extending the sequence with a quotation adapted from Paul Willemen (1981) that I already planned to use as an epigraph to ‘Men Shouting’, about the pleasure of watching the male in action and history films. In this context the quotation could have an ironic tinge, because the focus was shifted to the agency of objects rather than men.

I presented a possible brief transition from episode six and indicative moments from the work on episode seven (video clip).

We talked about how the work done seemed to foreground a lack of a structure for the episode. We discussed a scene from Too Big To Fail, a montage of telephone calls with multiple characters, which might be used as a foundation for the episode.

Constraints set:

1. Use the phone call montage from Too Big To Fail as the structural basis for a montage of the three films. 
2. Play with sound, with attention to (privileging) the ‘telephone line’ voice and dial tones. 
3. Mix in the quotation taken from Paul Willemen. 

Meeting 3

The work done was preliminary in nature and I admitted to ignoring the instruction to structure the material in accordance with the montage scene from Too Big To Fail. On the editing timeline, I organised images of phones from the three films based on where they were placed on screen (left/right, top/bottom/diagonal/moving, etc.). I imagined combining these images using multiscreen, although I wasn’t enthused by the idea. The audio clip records how I categorised phone voices by content (money talk, etc.) or mood (exasperation, etc.). How could I give some form to these phone voices, I wondered.

I knew I wished to combine and intercut the images and phone voices with the quotation I had been working on, which featured text, speech, and dial tones (video clip).

Marie admitted that it was hard to give feedback on the material because it was so fragmentary. But she noted its intensity: would this be consistent across the video essay and might it be too much? This led to a suggested constraint:

Constraint set:

1. No visuals. (I resisted this constraint in the short term but followed it in the version of the episode (see below) completed beyond 3WI.)

Listening back to our knotty and detailed conversation in meeting three, it’s clear I was casting about for an approach to organising the material that was at once arbitrary and motivated. Effects that were merely interesting (or virtuoso) weren’t acceptable, and the treatment of the material in episode seven had to differ from and elaborate other episodes.

Further constraints set:

1. Make three or four chunks of voices to be interspersed with epigraph section, organised by sound quality or aural ‘texture’ rather than content. 
2. If I insist on using images: isolate phone objects; use freeze frames only and use the slideshow facility on a photo app to generate the image combinations. 

Meeting 4

The video clip shows the brief material I managed to put together for meeting four, with the quotation text and its provisional audio intercut with multiscreen freeze frame chunks, to which audio hadn’t yet been added. 

I was frustrated with the work and wanted to use the session to understand why I’d had such an unproductive experience. I sound combative in the meeting recording, as in this audio clip in which Marie defends her approach to constraint-setting.

Marie elicited from me my sense of the trajectory of the work over the course of the meetings, and so a way forward based on previous ideas and the materials collected for the episode. Ultimately (in the version completed and published beyond the 3WI project), I restricted the visual track to the quotation text as Marie had suggested, and mixed dialogue from phone conversations with a witty composition of mouse clicks by Nicholas Britell from The Big Short soundtrack.

Continue to Reflective discussion