I was asked late last year to come up with some audio for a track in Alan Dunn’s King Kong 1933 project, after I had responded on Facebook to his post of the King Kong statue on the back of a lorry.
The idea was to create a small audio track to go over a 2 minute recording taken from the Original 1933 movie (out of copyright I guess). Quite quickly I came to the idea of doing a voiceover, almost a news report of the incident where as a child I went with my mother to see the statue. The only trouble with that idea was that it just felt really false so it sat on the back burner for a while.
During this time I was listening to loads of podcasts and Radio 4’s daytime schedule had become a close friend.
I needed to come up with something so I did what i normally do when I need to think, I went out walking. I even took the dog on occasions. I do this all the time sadly -> To help me remember the incident I started recording myself talking about what took place; l mainly so I could fill out two minutes and make it a kind of coherent story at the same time. I recorded the story a number of times, telling and retelling the story in different places trying to hone it down to make sure the right details were included and the get the whole idea of Saturdays as a boy being dragged around town by my mother. This whole incident took place 40 years ago and I wouldn’t say I had a great memory anyway.
OK – So then Alan started nagging me for the finished piece. I’d been meaning to do it over Christmas but Christmas fell apart and so did that idea. So I delayed and I was glad I did. I didn’t want some sort of crazy voice over describing what happened and the now shortness of time meant that I couldn’t script it anyway.
In the end I went for a pure reminisce style taking inspiration from Radio 4, the recordings are me on the street walking around (walking helps me remember did I say that). I simply edited them down to two minutes and overlay’d the track to the original. In the second half of the track there is the gentle click of metal that’s actually the dog’s lead.
Have a listen and let me know what you think. This is just my track but do visit Alan’s site at http://alandunn67.co.uk/kingkong1933.html to get the full experience of this project.
