Process Piece - Making Bacon

For our process piece, we decided to record the process of somebody making breakfast. This breakfast just happened to include bacon, which, as we all know, makes scrumptious sizzles and pops as it cooks, so much so, that you can almost taste it while it’s cooking.

We tried to vary the distance of the microphone to the subject in order to record the best sound. For instance, the bacon was sizzling and popping very loudly, so we didn’t put the mic as close as, say, the person washing their hands at the end. We didn’t do this perfectly, however, because when the person gets the pans out of the cupboard and sets them on the stove, it’s a very loud “clank!” sound, and we should have backed the mic off of that a bit.

We recorded over 14 minutes of audio for this Process Piece, and only ended up using around a minute and  a half, meaning that 12 ½ minutes went unused. Not that the audio in and of itself was bad, but we chose to just use the process of cooking the bacon and preparing the breakfast. We chose to assemble the clips in a logical order, so that it would be easy to identify what was happening in the process at any specific time. We feel that all of the sounds that we used are “everyday sounds,” meaning that most people would be able to identify what is going on at any given moment.

Our process piece is a very observational piece, what Broderick Fox calls “direct cinema,” with the uninterrupted actions are the focus. There is no human voice-over, dictating what’s going on. It’s up to the listener to observe what is going on, and to then make the proper connections to the visuals in their minds.

More than anything we just wanted to make something that sounded interesting. We wanted to take regular, everyday sounds that everyone is familiar with but focus in on them and make something deeper. We recorded over fourteen minutes of audio; however, we meticulously went through each clip and selected only the parts that we felt were interesting to the ear. So even though our sounds might be everyday sounds, our first aspect of stylization is that we specifically chose to not include uninteresting sounds. Another way in which we stylized our process piece was by using the vinyl sound of a record throughout, in the background, almost as if we’re listening to a record of somebody cooking breakfast. We thought that it was a good way to give the piece some poetic texture, in an effort to “seek new ways to represent reality,” as Broderick Fox calls it in his book on documentary media.

Group Members:

Steven Bills

Aaron Hinton