Listening to all the sound recordings from last year’s shoot along the Oodnadatta Track is a partly frustrating, partly exhilarating experience.

I’m frustrated by the focus in most recordings. Like I feared, they’re not what I would have recorded if I had been all alone out there.

It’s not a big drama. Each production turns out differently than what you had planned or hoped for in preproduction. And then it shifts again during postproduction. So it goes.

I nevertheless wonder what I would have done if I’d been there all alone. Gone mad, possibly. 12 days is a long time to spend by yourself.

Still, listening through all the recordings, I’m mostly struck by how eerily quiet they are. I was under the impression that the shoot was one big failure. Too much wind, too many flies, etc etc. That was the failure we hoped and planned for.

But, surprisingly, quite a lot of recordings are not a failure at all. True, none of them are free of self-noise, as expected. The DSM recordings are useless because of this. The NT4 recordings are quite often very beautifully quiet. And the Neumann recordings are incredibly and eerily still. There’s not that many as I didn’t have proper wind protection for the Neumann mic and even the ones I have get messed up by the wind. But there’s something incredibly touching about that.

Very exciting.