One Day


ONE DAY (2005)

Country: Australia

Duration: 60 minutes

Format: PAL Digibeta/DVD – 5.1 surround audio – Installation and performance versions also available

Producer/Director: Julian Knowles

Music: Julian Knowles

Video: Julian Knowles

One Day is an extended work for video and sound, which seeks to find new relationships between sound and image in a cinematic context. The entire material for the work was generated from a 12 hour drive from Sydney, Australia down the south coast of New South Wales. The vehicle was fitted with an array of video cameras and microphones, which captured a multi-dimensional perspective of the landscape and soundscape of the entire journey. The final 60 minute work was then created through subtle editing and transformations of the field-captured video and sound materials, uncovering the poetry and musicality of the vehicle as it moves through the landscape, an exploration of travel as a kind of ‘inner cinema’. The work powerfully explores the cinematic and poetic world of the motor vehicle and the relationship between memory, movement, time and landscape. This work is one of series of works exploring the Australian landscape within strict temporal ‘snapshots’.

This is a drifting, hypnotic meditation on movement. Director, composer, sound and video artist Julian Knowles has an extensive background in Australian underground music, including his stint with experimental sound art ensemble Social Interiors. He has used the raw elements of this work to sculpt the kind of visual essay much loved by fans of Chris Marker and Chris Petit. “[One Day] seeks to find new relationships between sound and image in a cinematic context. The entire material for the work was generated from a 12-hour drive from Sydney down the south coast of New South Wales. “The vehicle was fitted with an array of video cameras and microphones, which captured a multi-dimensional perspective of the landscape and soundscape of the entire journey. The final work was then created through subtle editing and transformations of the field-captured materials, uncovering the poetry and musicality of the vehicle as it moves through the landscape, an exploration of travel as a kind of ‘inner cinema’ (Melbourne International Film Festival).

This creative research is situated in the fields of audio visual composition. experimental cinema, music video and production innovation.  The primary research objective was to seek methods for hybridising production techniques from the film, audio-visual composition and electro-acoustic music traditions to better understand how connecting experimental practices in these fields might expand the range of possible relationships between sound and image in a work. The research builds on theories of sound and music perception articulated by Chion (1994) and Smalley (1997), specifically the aspects of sound structures that move the listener between causal and abstract listening modes. These theories of listening are not intended to be the foundation for composition rather they are intended as analytical tools. In this work these theories were used to develop and demonstrate compositional techniques that provide tools to move the listener nimbly between causal and abstract listening modes in an audio-visual context. A secondary research objective was to examine the impact of collapsing production roles into one author role and subverting accepted production process sequencing (picture followed by sound) in order to understand how this might make new relationships possible between sound and image.

The work was funded by a new work grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and was selected for the Australian Showcase program at the 2005 Melbourne International Film Festival. It was subsequently selected for international presentation at the 2005 Cinema des Antipodes festival in St Tropez, France.