 Again, welcome everyone and this is the first time I believe that the sauce, music's public seminar actually going online, so it's going to be a little bit experimental for us as well. I just want to specify once again what are we going to do here today, what are we going to discuss and who are actually the people who will intervene, because I believe that not all of you have received the first email with the abstract of these seminars and our personal biographies. So the idea was to share with students and scholars our ethnographic experience, our personal experience in the field, and basically to show which kind of challenges we have encountered and what kind of outcomes and impact these challenges have are still having our head on our researches. We have decided to do that because as many people who enroll in ethnomusicology courses and the universities, they do not have any formal training in visual anthropology or ethnographic filming and today more than ever is kind of very common and widespread practice to do filming in the field. And we personally, the three of us, we didn't have any training and we just kind of learned in the process of doing, in the process of having our fieldwork experience and that as you as you will see has produced different results. We had, the three of us in fact has, we had like different approaches and different areas of research and of course, yeah, as I said different results. I'm gonna just like read our biographies so to have an idea of who we are and what are we going to talk today. So I am Lorenzo Chiarofonte and I am completing a PhD on sign language music and dance in possession cult ceremonies in Burma, Myanmar. I spent long research stays in the field, filming in crowded and turbulent ritual performances. My research work is based on the analysis of the interactions between musicians, dancers and sounds and movements. Our second speaker, Kirit Singh is currently undertaking his PhD on Hindustani music and the Gurbani Kirtan tradition in colonial Punjab. He has utilized crowdfunding and community engagement to support his fieldwork costs and raise awareness of his research work through various social media channels, a project which is called the Mardana project. As part of this process, he's also working on a short film highlighting the colonial impact on Sikh musical tradition. And finally, for the last 28 years, Martin Kredik has been regularly visiting a group of Baka forest people in Cameroon near the border with Congo. He has many years experience of filming in the rainforest far away from mains electricity. And recently he has been making immersive 360 degrees films of traditional music and dance. So this is very briefly who we are. And the idea was to provide the source students mostly, but also I mean other discuss and raise some discussion about what which kind of filming strategies might be used on the field during the field research. And obviously, when we planned this seminar, it was another time. We were supposed to have this seminar at the beginning of March and March has changed since then. So I'm sure that this issue will will come up in the in the final round table that we will have at the end of our presentations. Because as you will see, I mean, at least the one while I was preparing my presentation, it felt a little bit like this, this is not exactly happening anymore, unfortunately. But I mean, hopefully we will be back on fieldwork soon enough, sooner than later. So yeah, if there is no one else coming in, Kirit, should we? Yeah, I mean, I'm getting one person every minute. Okay, so well, okay, so yeah, we'll wait, we'll wait for let's wait for other people to join maybe while I will present with my presentation. And of course, thank you again to Professor Rachel Harris for organizing this together with us and to Source Music Department for hosting this event, even if still virtually. So yeah, we're going online. Well, let's hope that this will will run smoothly. And once again, I mean, you got the main guidelines in the email that you have received. But just for now, remember to keep your mic muted and to shut off, to shut down your videos so that you won't interfere with the with the with the presentation. And we will provide a link to the videos that you are supposed to watch. And we will allow you some time to watch it. And then you can come back here to the to the Zoom meeting to continue our discussion. I'll just add one thing there. I would recommend if people have a secondary device to watch the videos, so you don't have to, if you're on a tablet or a phone, so you don't leave the meeting. Otherwise, it's going to be very difficult for us to try and readmit people into the meeting. Right. Ideally, you're on laptops, and you can just switch between your browser to watch the videos and come back to the Zoom application. Or if not, have the two devices so that you can keep the Zoom meeting open, because we're not going to be able to have people leave and then come back into the meeting. So definitely having a secondary device for watching the videos is recommended. And we'll put the links to the videos in the chat, the Zoom chat. Yeah. Sorry, Lorenzo. No, no, that's all right. Actually, I wanted to thank you as well, because without Kirit organising this hosting videos on Zoom, it wouldn't be possible to have this one. And yeah, so I guess this is more or less clear. So, yeah, remember to turn off your video and shut your, turn off your microphone. And if that's okay, we can start with the first presentation, which would be me. And then we will continue with Kirit and Martin, finally. Yeah, as I anticipated, we're going to cover different topics and areas of research. And in this presentation, specifically, I will focus on ethnographic filming as a support to music analysis. And this includes, of course, musical transcriptions, movements and performance analysis, and musicians, dancers, interactions. And I'm also going to present briefly the software that I used to do all these kind of, these kind of things. I'm going to give you some background first. So my research focuses on the music and dances of Nakana West, the repossession ceremonies in urban Burma or Myanmar, if you prefer. These ceremonies take place in a temporary ritual pavilion called the Nakana, which is the one that you see to your left. In this space, spirit mediums, musicians and a crowd of devotees gather to pay homage to the nuts Burmese spirits, and to please them with offering of food, drinks, music and dances. The Burmese spirits are invited to join and participate to the ceremony. And they are embodied consecutively by professional spirit mediums and in some occasions by the devotees, in which case the experience can be quite overwhelming, as you can see in the second image. Depossession dances are supported by the Burmese sign wine ensemble, whose sound also articulates the ceremonial time. This ensemble is composed of six to eight musicians and includes tune drum circle, tune gong circle, gong chimes, shoam, cymbals, ideophones and at least one singer. Normally, there are massive speakers sitting on one side of the ritual pavilion blasting the amplified sound of the ensemble with deafening volumes. And this is just a very brief introduction to give you an idea of which kind of situation I found myself filming in. And also, as you probably understand, there are several processes that are simultaneously happening in an extremely tiny and crowded space. Depossession dances, in fact, take place in front of the sign of the sign and symbol and this is the only space in which it is possible to move after the beginning of the ceremony. The two sides of the pavilion are occupied by the musical instruments and the spirit altar, and all the remaining space in the middle is occupied by a large number of devotees who continuously come and leave from and to the ritual pavilion. During the dance, these massive devotees is constantly moving around, bringing offerings to the possessed dancers and of course interacting with the spirits. This of course makes extremely difficult to find a good and safe position from which filming the entire event. And also because multiple processes are going on at the same time and because I was filming all by myself, I had to decide if I wanted to film the musicians one or more, if possible, or the dancers or the participants. So in my filming experience, I decided to prioritize a certain freedom of movement. I used only one camera with an external microphone mounted on it. You can see the picture of my set in the background here. And when I wanted to film the musician, I positioned a tripod behind the ensemble and filmed from there but at that point I wasn't able to film the dancers. And when I was filming the dancers, I usually stayed in front of the ensemble standing in one angle packed together with the devotees and I missed the details of the musicians' performance. In the most agitated moments, I used my tripod that has an extended handhold, which was kind of solid but still subjected to the crowd movements and filmed from an elevated point of view. And this is the case of the first example that I'm now going to send you. You will see the dance of a group of devotees for two particularly famous spirits, the Tambion brothers. There is a large and excited crowd which is constantly moving and they're pushing, pressing, clapping and trying to grab the money that the dancers are sharing with them. It's kind of a good example to show the difficulties of ethnographic filming. There are several problems of course with this video. I'm sure you have noticed a couple of moments when the filming becomes particularly unstable. At the beginning a devotee hit me and made my camera drop for just a moment and towards the end the crowd pushed me trying to grab the money bills that the dancer had thrown. So this video, I mean my personal comment is it's probably good enough as an ethnographic video but probably not enough for a documentary. The view from above is useful to have a panoramic view on what is going on in terms of processes among the audience but it doesn't really get the viewer inside the scene which is sometimes what you want to do with ethnographic filming. So what did I do with this video? I use it to analyze the interactions between the crowds and the sound of the ensemble. First I selected specific parts of the video as this video of course was part of a larger longer filming moment and used simple video editing software to get the part that I was interested in. Mac users can use iMove, PC users can use Windows Movie Maker. Both softwares are very similar, simple and intuitive to use and they're free so you will find them to already downloaded on your computer most of the time. Once I decided what part I was interested in, I created a transcription of the main events happening in this performance and those of you who are familiar with regular Pureshi's analysis of the Kawali will recognize more than one resemblance with my transcription and that methodology. So in this transcription here you have all the actors of the performance and the main events happening are highlighted with different colors here in the middle and they are put in sequentially in line according to a timeline which you find here on top. So this transcription obviously doesn't include any details about the sign, music performance or the specific dance movements that the dancer are making. So this takes us to the second example. Video in fact represents an invaluable resource in music transcriptions and analysis and focusing the camera on one or more musicians. Video can work as a support for music transcription making it possible to note particulars that might otherwise escape through listening. More importantly using videos, it is possible using videos to extend the musical analysis to the movements performed by the musicians or between the musicians and the other performance while they are in the middle of the performance. And this is in fact the case of the second example. Here you will see a professional spirit dancer embodying a buffalo nut, so a buffalo spirit and it is a moment of spirit possession so the dancing here is particularly intense and the dancer jumps like a buffalo in the ponds as the Burmese people I asked to about this video describe this action. And interestingly these jumps are supported by musical accents produced by the sign musicians and you can if you look at the drum circle player which is the guy framed in this video you will see how his whole body is involved in the performance. So his head, his torso, his arms and particularly evident is the muscular tension of the of the arms. So I will now send you the second link and this is much shorter than the first one and then once again we can come back to discuss. So yeah I hope everyone is back. So once again what did I do with this video instead? So after I selected the part that I was interested in I used the software transcribe you can see a snapshot of this software to find the exact moments when the movements of the musicians and the dancer synchronized together and transcribe is an extremely useful software and it allows you to combine audio and video and to change the reproduction speed without altering the pitch and also it allows you to create these markers here and to navigate in the recording creating sections which is extremely useful and it allows you to save a lot of time while doing music analysis. Then using the music notation software in this case CBLIUS but you can also use Finale which is just as good. I was able to create a detailed music transcription and then using a graphic software I included the jumps of the of the dancer which I have previously found in using using transcribe. So the final transcription which is something I am currently working on you will you can see it here this is this is the final form and of course it includes the music and also the moment of synchronization and interaction with the dancer with these arrows and these red boxes. So I'm going to close like to finish this right now so to sum up like ethnographic videos represent an invaluable support in ethnomusicological analysis for for several reasons and combined with the with the right software videos can be used as an aid in music transcription or to extend the analysis to body movements and interactions between the performers. This can help reveal details that can change the shape of the music transcriptions and the end of the performance analysis of course however the moment of the video production on the field is of capital importance and knowing in advance the filming environment represents a huge advantage and as it is being familiar with the object of filming so in my case for example knowing what it is about to happen during the ceremony and gave me the time to to get to a better spot and to film whatever I was interested in from there and knowing your field your field and the research object will influence the kind of filming instruments that you will take with you in your research so in my case I opted for a light and camera and mic which kind of allow me to adapt to a constantly changing situation and circumstances but the final analysis will obviously depend on where an ethnographer has decided or was forced sometimes to direct their camera and also by which kind of camera and mic you will be using so kind of it's it's important to choose wisely and and this is this is it I think so I hope I kept my time get it I will stop sharing now and we can and I will pass the word to to Kirit who will continue with this presentation so thanks Lorenzo I'm just going to begin by summarizing my research project so I'm also third-year PhD student working on Hindustani music and seek Putin tradition in colonial Punjab so my work is largely historiographical for that reason but I wanted my historiography to be based on both written and oral histories so video interviews became a part of my project and with Punjab being split over both India and Pakistan I was keen to visit both countries for the field work and though my PhD has been partly funded I need to raise my own funds for the extended fieldwork trips in two countries so sensing the potential and I guess in the absence of any other options I was compelled to opt for crowdfunding and today I'm going to be sharing with you my experience of this process how that has grown into a larger ongoing project based around social media and video-based content and led to the production of a short film relating to my research so with my topic having an inherent relevance to the Sikh community with a significant and wealthy international diaspora I had a clear defined set of potential funders I had also a harboured desire for my research work to have an impact beyond the realm of academia and had toyed with the idea of delivering some kind of documentary or film-based output in order that aspects of the research reach a wider audience so opting for a crowd funder in my case was a logical step and I had some potential deliverables a deliverables and incentive to offer and there was a clear well-defined community so I'm just going to admit a few more people that are waiting yeah so the campaign was successful and I managed to raise more than 20,000 pounds exceeding my target figure and it was run over six weeks during the summer of 2018 I must stress that it was it took several weeks of preparation making a short campaign video scheduling a series of fundraising events planning a series of social media posts in order to generate and maintain a sense of interest and excitement throughout the campaign in short it was like a full-time job for the best part of two months however it was largely successful and I was able to raise a significant sum of money in a very short space of time so I've listed some pros and cons of funding in this way it's definitely an empowering tool it instantly creates an interested community around your work and actually through the network of contacts that you build new doors can open and I had initially planned to create the video myself but based on some funders that came on board an award-winning filmmaker and Nathan Drillo from Canada came on board and this was something that I could have never imagined prior to the fundraising process so the trade-offs of crowdfunding are that I've had to take on a significant workload alongside my research and I must stress that getting people to part with their money in the first place is is not an easy task especially for you know just someone else's personal research interests ultimately which is what it is and it may not work it may not be viable for all cases however on the whole crowdfunding has been a very positive and rewarding process for me and gives my work a greater sense of meaning having an interested audience and a set of deliverables so as an extension of the crowd funder the project has organically grown into having its own social media presence under the name of the Modana project which is on youtube and instagram this serves multiple purposes it allows me to update the community with regard to the progress of the project it raises awareness about the work and it allows for growing the community and building an audience before the release of the film for example so initially I had around 120 funders from the crowdfunding process and that has grown to a community of several thousand followers on instagram and youtube in a space of less than two years social media also allows for effective sharing of your content and as a means for disseminating knowledge and educating your community I feel it plays a useful role in working to construct a bridge between the academic and real world so to speak a bridge which is often left neglected so for me having a filmmaker on board all of a sudden created a whole new set of parameters new planning and logistical overheads I essentially overnight became a project manager and producer of a film to be shot over two countries one of which I'd never visited in my life with a team of four members plus the presence of two leading funders who wanted to be present on the shoot and with no prior experience in this role lack of local contacts and experience in Pakistan especially planning became very important and even still it was a steep learning curve in both India and Pakistan I allowed myself several weeks on the ground before the arrival of the rest of the team and the start of the shoot in order to establish contacts and make connections the arrival of Nathan meant that the film's ambitions were also much bigger now so film festivals and perhaps even Netflix and yet given that £20,000 remains actually a very humble budget in this context so with limited resources and increased responsibility there was only one chance really to get the shoot right in both countries and one thing I experienced is the need to be ready for the unexpected and lay out some sort of contingency allowing margins in terms of both time and money to deal with unforeseeable circumstances which personally I had to face many of and though I don't have time to go into these now I'm happy to discuss those in the round table afterwards having a team despite the logistical overheads had its added advantages so we could document the whole process create a series of vlogs do live Instagram stories to you know give something back to the funders while we were out there and you can you know if anyone's bored running out of digital entertainment during the coronavirus lockdown you can feel free to watch the vlogs on the YouTube channel so to finish though I'm low by no stretch of the imagination a professional videographer I'm just going to leave you some tips and techniques regarding interviews in particular based on my personal experience so the footage for the film was captured by Nathan our filmmaker but I was still dealing with separate video audio visual capture for interviews that were solely relevant for my research in some places these were I was alone with a single camera in some cases I had the team so I can have a two-camera setup and regarding equipment I definitely recommend using a clip on lapel mic to capture audio for interviews and for audio if you're just capturing music shotgun mic works well but that those could be quite expensive so the lapel mic is small cheap easy to travel with a great at reducing background noise as you'll see in the video example at the end tripods are also good but bulky and I actually chose to travel with a monopod which is something I fell in love with well out there it's it's very flexible it allows you to move with the subject adding some stability and it's portable you know you can put it just a little stick that fits into a rucksack spare batteries and spare memory cards goes without saying there are musts on your interviews I've kind of put interviews which have lasted more than 10 hours believe it or not and then with regards to location and environment you must try and find a quiet space looking at look at having the subject front lit so that they're sitting in front of a light source then you aim to have them on against the homogeneous non-destructive background such as a plane wall or if you're outside you have the option to introduce depth of field because you have more space by moving the subject further away from the background to achieve like a blurred background effect effective camera positioning and framing is also very important and a simple system that produces good results I've given in the diagram on the top right so you want the interview interviewer situated adjacent to the camera and the subject looking at the interviewer not the camera lens for a more natural feel basically if the camera is to the interviewer's right hand side as shown in this diagram then you it should be angled such that the subject is also just off center of the frame also to the right hand side it should be close enough so that the subject's legs for example are not shown but far away enough from the subject to catch some torso and hand movements which are important as well as the head in you know in communication and try and have the lens at the height of the eye level not above that slightly lower can work sometimes if you're going for more zoomed in shots so that's all I'm going to be saying today I'm going to leave you with an extended video with various short clips that demonstrate some of the things that I've been talking about so I'm just going to post the link and then once the links once you've seen the video I'm going to give you five minutes to watch the video and then that'll be me done and pass over to Martin you do you think you don't keep the show to keep it alive or the way see He was sitting at the Tabla Surkar, and he had to play a thika. He had to call it Nagama, and call it Shahan. He had to play it, and then he had to go to Tabla. He was very warm for 10 minutes. He wanted to play it, and he was playing it. I myself was playing it. Even today in the Kirtanj, he has to play Shahan. Sometimes on the Internet, I have to play different 15-16 songs. Yes, you are asking that Mr. Fadeh Nikhan, the son of Patayal, who is the son-in-law of Alibu Jannayal, is going to play a thika in the village. He said that all the people like Mr. Fadeh Nikhan, Surila, Alibu Jannayal, are very well-prepared. And this is what Mr. Chote Ghuram Nikhan said. He said that Mr. Darbar was very well-prepared. He is singing Fadeh Nikhan. There are a lot of people like Mr. Pandit and Mr. Chote Ghuram Nikhan. He said that Mr. Pandit will be sitting in the room. So I hope you have got an example of different angles that can work well in different circumstances. Yes. Okay, you're making me the moderator or not? Yes. Oh, you are. I'm just going to admit a few more people seeing that they can catch your last presentation. So I'll have to do that job. Okay, are you ready? Am I in charge? Okay, sorry about this. Okay, well I'll assume everyone's back here and hearing me. When I was asked to take part in this seminar, I was a bit surprised because I had never thought of myself as an ethnographic filmmaker before, but when I thought about it, although I've made my living as a touring musician and a producer, for the last 15 years or so, I suppose I have been making ethnographic films. So I'll do a brief background. I first went to visit the back of forest people back in 1992 after seeing a television program and hearing their music. I was just blown away. It was a bit of a dream. I said, oh, we've got to go here. I never believed it would happen, but a series of coincidences took me there. Change My Life inspired an album I made called Spirit of the Forest, which, as well as leading to the possibility of me touring around the world with my band, Bacca Beyond, it also meant that we'd earned royalties that belonged to the Bacca and had to keep going back to start with to find out the best way of getting it to them, build a relationship, really understand them. And it started a charity global music exchange for that. If I work out how to start the screen, now I, whoops, not that one. Sorry, this isn't working. There we go. Now, hopefully you should see the screen. It's a bit different from me from now, because it's some, I'm not seeing how it was before. So there I am arriving at the Bacca. It's not working with that probably. In the village. Now, to get film here, you have to walk. And then this is, this is a typical bridge. So everything you take, you have to be able to carry, which limits what you can do. And as a musician, my main drive to begin with is to record the sound as best as possible. And my ambition was always to record the music that I'd played with them there, which was just really different from here. And I wanted to be able to record that in, as well as I could record our band at home. So that has always been my, that was always my direction. But I realized that I was somewhere which was pretty unique. And so I did buy a video camera and would document what I was doing. Now, this led to various things. I mean, for a start, once you start filming people, it's quite good showing the people, the films. Oops. Oh, this is, I'll forget. So here you see people looking at the film. They want to see it back. It's actually a really good opportunity for taking interesting crowd shots as well because everyone's concentrating on the films. Now, by 2002, I'd started experimenting with multi-tracking. To start with, it was just I took a laptop, managed to make that work there. This is actually inside a big traditional hut we built for playing music. The backer had told us in meetings that what they wanted was a music house. And so in 2002, we planned it. The builder wasn't able to come to the next year. So while I was there, I told them about it and they started building their own. This was it. 2003 was when we really started. Now that enabled a base which made filming easier because, as you imagine, the rainforest, it's very difficult to charge things up. At the time, initially, I was recording with a Sony Pro Walkman, which needed batteries. The batteries you buy there hardly last any time at all. So everything you had to carry with you. Mike stands heavy. So we'd make them. These ones made out of sticks. The backer extremely adept. You just say, I want to fork stick. They'll go up two minutes later. One comes back sharp and then they'll dig it in the ground. They built me a little hut for the recording in case it rained. So come 2004, I had six track recording. And this is some of the performance of that, which ended up with this album, Gatti Bongo. So that was my ambition achieved, really, then. So let's go on to the first film. Oh, yes, it's just going to say. I mean, how I would go about filming then is because I was concentrating on recording, I would set up a tripod. While I was setting up and film as much as possible, then there would come a certain time when the sound was sorting out itself. And then I would sort of maybe take the camera and zoom in on various things I was interested in. This time this is Clyde. He's actually the drummer of our band now, but he was only 18 when he came. He was good at filming. So for this first film, really it was actually put together from lots of little bits of footage, some of it was from the actual music, some of it was clipped in. I'll just show it, and then I'll talk a bit more about it afterwards. So the first, this is the first link here. Yeah, so I was saying filming in other places, you have to, in a rainforest, it's very difficult with limited what you can carry. So the mic stands there were built. Let me just share this screen again. I hope you haven't got these things on top of that. But basically, efficient record, everything's got so much better over the 25 years I've been doing this. So whereas before I'd have to carry loads of batteries, now a little zoom recorder, you can power it off USB. So a little pebble power pack seems to run it as long as you want. I would say, improvised with mic stands, especially if you're in a forest with plenty of trees and woods and things to tie. Mic cables are very heavy. I got some specially made, very small so that, I don't know if you can see this. So I'll show you that later when we stop this. I think I'll go off the screen share now because it's easier just to talk to you here, I think. So mic leads like this, much smaller because they're really heavy. 4K camera is really useful, especially from the point of view when you're only one filmmaker because you can take a big wide angle of it and you can take it to a quarter size while remaining it while it stays being 4K. Now the next film I'd like to show you is, it's one of the water drumming it's called. So that was actually recorded with a stereo pair of microphones on the bank. Very simple recording. When you've only got a few people in a musical thing, it's very easy because you can see it all. But as soon as you've got a big group of people, especially with singers and dancers and musicians as Lorenzo was saying, you have to make choices. Now from an ethnographical point of view, I think it's actually that the 360 is really good from this point of view because the first film particularly you saw, I mean that was my choice to put different bits of dance in, different concentrate on different people. But with the 360, one as the filmmaker, you don't have the option to edit because as soon as you start editing in an immersive thing, it's an obvious transition. And it's really good for the traditional dance because the traditional dance isn't a performance, it's something that everyone who's present is involved in. And it takes time to build up and it comes and then the spirit comes as the music develops and the people develop. When you're putting it on a sort of flat and traditional film, you have to lead people in, you have to make decisions and lead people through a certain way. Whereas with the 360, it's there and people can experience it as they want. And what I found is people watching the films I've put up, they'll be seeing things I never even noticed. So let's go on to that. If anyone has got a tablet, it is best watching it that because you can move your tablet around like this and the picture changes. But anyway, so this is actually three films put together. The first is just in a camp and it's actually quite like how the music would be traditionally, you know, spontaneously, although obviously people are aware of the camera. The second one was done more recently where I was thinking more in terms of projecting it in a space. And the third part was the first lot of filming I did a year before that where I only knew about headsets and I had to go on one and thought, this is the best way I can imagine to put across traditional dance. So I'd be interested to know which you think is best. So here's the link. Have you got that one now, I hope so. And Lorenzo, when this is over, I think I'll switch this back to you while the film's playing. Yeah, okay. And then you can take it on when you think that's finished. So that's all I have to say. And any questions in the roundtable? So we got a few to keep track of. Everyone's comment while it was kind of hard. So I believe there is one question for asking which kind of software did you use to do the editing? And another one for Martin, if you add any effects on the recorded sound. But I mean, I suggest that now, since we are going to have this roundtable question and answer session now, we're going to have it for another like 40, 45 minutes. So I hope it's enough for everyone to ask some questions if they want. So if you want to speak, just type your question in the chat room or you can just type your entire question and we will read that aloud and we'll try to answer you. Shall I take my question in the meantime? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So I was using Premiere Pro to edit and it's not an easy to use software in relation to like iMovie or Movie Maker. As Lorenzo mentioned, they're very easy to use. I had some previous experience and I've just been kind of self-taught Premiere Pro user in the past. So I was using Premiere Pro to do some post-work on the videos that I was editing. But yeah, it takes some time to learn it or undertake a course or something if you don't have the kind of motivation to do a self-learning thing. Yeah. Martin, we have extremely diverse comments on your 360 videos. The camera I use actually was a Fly 360 4K. Unfortunately, they don't make them anymore and there's no, so there's no, they seem to have disappeared off the planet. So I'm, I thought I'd lost the charger for it and found that they were completely impossible if I found it luckily. So I'm going to have to really look after that. As far as sound, yeah, the first film was multi-tracked and then that's the nature of multi-tracked. You have to then recreate it to try and make it try and make it sound real because it's inherently not real in the official. So there was, I was, I was producing it as I would record. So yeah, there was effects on it. The water drumming was as is, it's just picked up. There's no extra bass or drums or anything put on it. It's an amazing sound if you've got to play it through the speakers. Similarly with the 360, I've now got a new, this is a 360 microphone. You can't actually see it's got a windshield on it, but it's a tetrahedral. So I haven't a clue how it does it, but with those films, if you put headphones on and move around, the sound actually changes. So again, you have very little movement to mix that sound. It's as the camera records it. And in some way, I love that because I spend so long editing and mixing that take that away from me and then actually it frees me up to just do the music and record and film. So yeah, I hope that answers those questions. So we have a few questions already and I will just follow the order they are popping in. So there is one for the three of us from Rachel and what kind of responses we had to our films from the communities we have worked with. So I mean, I will just answer really quickly to this one. I'm not, usually when I went to these ceremonies, I wasn't the only one filming because it's a spirit possession in Burma. It's a positive thing. So it's not like an exorcism. It's not something to be ashamed of. So usually, especially when people sponsored huge ceremonies, like a lot of people were involved, a lot of money was involved. And they were proudly showing off their wealth, which they acquired thanks to the help of the spirits. And that obviously meant that there was also like a troop of camera men, like professional camera men, filming those ceremonies together with me and sometimes competing for spaces with me. In other cases, these camera men were not there. And in which case the spirit medium or the musicians, they asked me to give them a recording of the whole ceremony, which when I could, I kind of did maybe selecting the main moments, the one that I knew they were interested in after negotiating with them and create Burma DVD and just give them as a gift, which was also kind of a way to give something back after being accepted in this community. This just very quickly. And Kirit and Martin, you want to answer to that? Kirit, you first? Yeah. So I haven't really gotten to the stage where I've shared much of my content with the community, both in terms of the funders and the followers of the project or in terms of the interview subjects themselves. But that's, for me, that's kind of a very long term thing. It's going to be, I've told people that they shouldn't expect anything soon because I'm kind of trying to knuckle down with my thesis at the moment. But just like in terms of even just the blog series that we did, documenting the journey with Nathan and trying to show people what was involved in making the video, both in India and Pakistan, we had I think like 10 episodes, series of blogs from both countries. And yeah, that was very well received. A lot of people really appreciate being able to feel like they were there with us and go on their journey with us, see what we saw and almost be with us as we were making the film. So we've had positive response. But yeah, in terms of the actual video footage that I captured and what Nathan captured, what Nathan captured is undergoing transcription and translation for the film. And what I've captured is kind of similarly undergoing a similar process. But that will be released in the kind of much more longer term. So looking at the next two, three years, really. Yeah. Well, little film shows have become a regular occurrence now. I have a little Pico projector that's not much bigger than a phone, a bit fatter and runs off 12 volts. So it's sort of a regular thing in the music house we built to show videos. And obviously, I mean, everyone loves going to the cinema. So it's especially when there's not a lot of entertainment like that in the forest. So people love it. They see people who died, they're sad, they express it. I've been going there for 27 years. A lot of people haven't known anything else. And a lot of people there, when I first went there, well, I've been 14 people who died these last two years, actually. Because they will get into their 50s and 60s. And it's really sad because that's the lifespan. But so I have become almost like their photographer for the family album. I mean, the problem when you see them watching the films earlier on when I was there, I'd be so conscious of battery pattern. I'd really try not to show people films because I was aware of how much battery it was using up. And then it becomes really difficult to give reasons why they can't watch it. We've got solar panels and things at the basement. So messages are flowing in. So let's just like try to answer the quick ones. So for Kirit, the name of the Raga or piece played in the videos at around two minutes. Yeah, I can wrap through a few questions. Quick ones that I've made note of. So the Raga at two minutes with the singer with the harmonium was Raga Patidip. And that was a Shabad, which is a sacred song item from the World Grandsire, which is the scripture of the Sikhs. But the music was set to Raga Patidip. And there was another question that came in for me, just quick one regarding lenses, Zoom versus Prime lens. I put on the presentation that Zoom lens is good if you're on your own because it gives you flexibility in a small space to choose how far in you want to be. But personally, I actually took Prime lenses, which are fixed Zoom, because the clarity and the quality of the image is much better. And so I had two very small, actually, they're very small. So they can fit in a bag too quite easily. And they give you then two options to go for a wide frame, or to go into a more zoomed in frame. Yeah, I'll pass on some of this. Yeah, just to reply to the same question. I, in general, I don't Zoom while I'm filming. I try to, because I mean, I don't need to, because the situation is quite intimate already. So I'm already there. I don't need to Zoom in. And as for the example, I showed, yeah, I have other videos in which I'm actually focusing on the feet, or maybe I'm moving from the upper part of the body to the lower part. But for this case specifically, I was focusing on the interactions between the musicians and the dancers. And these, like Burmese sign instruments, they have this beautiful, but kind of makes it difficult to film. They have these frames of wood and decorated, which basically cover the hands of the musician, and the whole lower part of the body. And usually also they stay on an upper level. They kind of, I don't know, create some kind of stage. But I mean, not really tall, but still upper. And this, of course, makes everything more difficult. The only way to film the musician is from behind, and the only way to film the dancers is from the front of the ensemble. And to take both of them together is extremely difficult. Let's see what else we have. There was a question about multi-tracking. I don't think it's saying how I recorded the women's singing. Now, I don't know if I, when I was doing that, I had six microphones, basically, and there'd be anything from sort of 10 to 30 people trying to sing. So the key thing is to sometimes have their own microphone, and some of the pictures. I don't know, can I still share the screen if I do that? No, I can't, doesn't matter. Some of the pictures I showed, you could see women crowding around a microphone. So it's not total separation, but there's enough separation to get an idea of who's doing what. I did actually transcribe the song you saw as part of an assignment at the end of last year. So that music is available if anyone wants to contact me later. I can probably get hold of that, maybe someone wants to study it. We have a couple of questions for the three of us about the perspective of the ethnographer, the position. I mean, how do we position ourselves as ethnographer behind the camera? And also something about cultural intimacy. I think I saw that there are several questions about that. And then there is one question which I believe being really pressing, which is about the current coronavirus situation, and the possibility, actually the impossibility of doing something like the one that we've been presenting today. So I guess... Can I say something about the cultural closeness that it was? I mean, I've found as an Englishman filming, I've been totally over worried about what people are going to think. Whenever a Cameroonian cameraman's come in, I've been initially a bit shocked that he'll be so in everyone's faces, and no one cares. I mean, to the point at a burial or funeral, he's right in there filming people crying, filming the body going in the grave. And it was obvious, actually, it was really not a problem for anyone present. So for myself, I... You know, you have... Well, to a certain extent it's different, because I know the people very well. But these people coming in didn't, and it didn't feel to me... I'm sure in other cultures it might be much more of a problem. How did you feel about that in your filming, Lorenzo? Because you were very much in a place... Well, I suppose they're used to filming as well, you were saying, weren't you? Well, I mean, on one hand, I mean, of course, you don't see much in general. You don't see many foreigners in Burma still today. And especially when I started to go there, it was now seven years ago, so the first time I went there, and there were even fewer at the time. And basically no one in the context of spirit possessions where I was working. So I would immediately kind of like stand out, you know, like, yeah, there is a white guy here. What is he doing? But I mean, it was kind of awkward at the beginning, because I mean, I didn't know exactly how to interact with them. But then when I started to build my network of people, I started to feel like I was going in a more protected environment, like, because maybe one of the musicians invited me, or maybe the spirit medium invited me. And let's say that the most awkward moment was when I had to step inside the houses of people I wasn't... People I didn't know. These ceremonies are private ceremonies. So the people host these ceremonies inside their houses. So what I did is I created a sort of, let's say a small short ritual for myself. Like as soon as I got inside this ritual pavilion, I would immediately ask for the house owner, the landlord, the organizer of the ceremony. And I would go there and introduce myself at the beginning with a few broken Burmese words that I knew and ask for permission to film. And they were always extremely happy about that, of course, because they were having, well, on one hand, because they were having a host, a guest from Europe, so which was kind of like, you know, I mean, I know it's problematic, but from their point of view, it made the whole thing more prestigious. And on the other hand, it was... I felt extremely welcomed because I was invited to sit down, have lunch or have dinner and eat with them. They would offer me something to drink, something to smoke. So I felt immediately at home that they were not shy. And after a while, this kind of shyness barrier also, which I also had kind of felt. And the things improved as soon as I started to speak Burmese more fluently. So, yeah, get it. So yeah, I mean, my context is quite different, I think, from both Martin and Lorenzo in the sense that you guys were doing more kind of performances of... Filming events, you know, there's a particular event or a ceremony or a performance of a particular item where you're just going in and filming. Like, what I was doing is just interviews, getting to know people, saying, I want to talk about your family history and this and that, and then saying when I'm there, you know, do you mind if I turn on the camera and record this and then have them sign a consent form someone else is asking about consent this now? So, yeah, my context is a little bit different. And then when we were filming music for the short film, it was very much kind of more staged, you know, we just say, can we come to your house and record or can we take you to this nice menu and record here? So, yeah, my position is kind of a little bit different. And just to go back to the consent question, which came, you know, from Eugea, it's... So, it was... I did face challenges in that respect. Some people, they just saw a form and they would immediately say, no, I'm not signing anything, which is challenging because the form, you know, from an ethics perspective is kind of very important. Sometimes you could, you know, use some form, that explanation saying, look, this is what's being said, it's just for university purposes, you know. Still, some people would not be happy to give permission. And also, in terms of venues as well, that was a good question, consent for filming at a certain place, especially in Pakistan. If you're seeing that on about with, you know, Nathan's got this huge professional camera, it attracts a lot of attention and you're not allowed to film out in public in Pakistan unless you have a visit, sorry, a journalist visa, which we tried to get for Nathan, but it was impossible. And in fact, he had to come on a tourist visa and he only got the visa by the time that we'd already landed in Pakistan, so it was a very difficult situation. But then, funnily enough, because it was a religious festival at the time, that we had security with us also, which our driver insisted that we had. And the security just said, oh, it's fine, you just pull out your camera and you know, you go ahead and film, we'll make sure no one comes and says anything to you. So it was just kind of good luck really that we had security and we were able to go into venues with the security team around us. And if anyone tried to come and say anything, they'd explain that they, you know, they can't get involved with us. So I think that was more of a fluke than anything else. But yeah, I think you have to talk to officials when it comes to venues to try and get permission to film before you do. So if it's in a public space or a private someone else's space, yeah, and with the subjects, it's challenging. I definitely face challenges on that aspect. Okay, so yeah, we have one, another question for Kirit about the social media and another one about permission and consent, which Kirit has been already addressing now. But I am really curious to answer the coronavirus and this auto ethnography and 3D ethnographic film. So, I mean, how do we engage with ethnography today? Starting, I mean, with the idea that anyway, I mean, we know about like virtual fieldwork since shadows in the field time. So it's not exactly a new thing. And I want to reply to this with a, I mean, I don't know if it's a reply, but I remember it was my first year at SOAS and there was this scholar who wasn't from SOAS. And we were just attending some kind of seminar. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was something about doing virtual fieldwork. And at the end of the presentation, after we left the room, this scholar said, like, this is not real fieldwork. Real fieldwork is when you go there, when you meet with people, when you interact with people. And I mean, I know this is the big question, right? I mean, is it because, I mean, if the community gathers online, then can we, as ethnographers, as social sciences, scientists, can we analyze this online community, this virtual community, just as we analyze a real life community? And I guess, I mean, either way, find a balance would be better. I mean, you cannot just base your own research on a virtual community. I guess you also have to see what happens when this virtual community actually meets. So, I mean, it would be great to, because I'm sure that nowadays, like everyone is, like every researcher is including online methodologies, fieldwork research, how to do research in the fieldwork online and these kinds of things, because this is the situation we are now. But I mean, how do we deal with that? How do we, if we cannot go back, or if we cannot go back for a long time? So, what do you think? I don't know. For me, it's like there's been so many people doing, I was a musician, that's my primary income. So, it's been completely knocked on the head. It's impossible to do a performance with people who aren't there, because there's always latency. You have to be in them here and now playing with each other. Even a few milliseconds of latency will mess it up. And so, I don't see it ever, you're never going to be able to collaborate with people in different places. So, that leaves you to perform online to other people and whatever. And I have, from an observer's point of view, I have no interest in that whatsoever. I like seeing music live and I've watched things and it's not the same. The immersive stuff I think is interesting from, I mean, how I've seen it being interesting is when I show it to other people, they're seeing things I've never seen. If I'm showing them a film, I have to decide what they're going to look at. And I think that's a very interesting thing when it comes to being ethnographic about it because that means someone else can look at it and find something else. It's still not the same as being there, but maybe it's better. And maybe if the people there, I mean, that's the most exciting thing for me with technology is that once I can be there and actually we can do a concert and people here can watch it, I take the musicians around villages and we play and we use that to bring people together so that we can then show films and bring the communities together because they're being extremely repressed and there's a lot of problems. And it gives them huge amounts of self-confidence to see, well, one is that back had been there, the only all backer band in Cameron, all the other bands with backer are led by someone from a town who has these backer who support him. So for the communities to see that they can do it and they heard them, they've seen them on television, they've seen them, some of the films have been shown on camera in television. They've never paid anyone anything for them. I mean, that's primarily initially, that was my drive was to them a green means of earning a living by getting their music out and about. Now they probably make more money off YouTube than selling records because no one buys CDs and streaming pays so little. So it's, you know, it's, but as far as doing research, better than not doing it, not seeing it, I think, but not as good as being there. Kiri, do you engage with social media much more than the two of us too? So what do you think? What social media in respect to the current? Yeah, I mean, like virtual field work, are you? Yeah, I mean, the internet is definitely, you know, you can definitely take the internet as a field. You know, there's several scholarly works that discuss this and for me, it's been very, you know, being out there and making context like getting people's phone numbers coming back here, especially for young people that are using, you know, smartphones and have WhatsApp and so on. It's been very fortunate for me, actually, because there's been times where I wanted to check something or maybe forgot to ask something or, you know, a date of birth that I forgot to check or questions now that I can just go and ping people on WhatsApp or give them a phone call and discuss things. So it's almost like the field work is not over. It's continuing through WhatsApp conversations on, you know, on the phone. I could easily continue, you know, do another interview recording of WhatsApp phone call, you know, to somebody. So for me, that field work process continues through technology. I think in the current scenario to get started, like without that physical contact to be initiating field work now, without being able to go and meet people and have that physical interaction, I think it's very challenging because I know personally I wouldn't have been able to do, I would have been able to achieve very little, basically, that way without having made contacts and being there to then, you know, bring those relationships forward and maintain those relationships. So and this also relates to a question which Julia asked about, you know, making that introduction and how to get into the field. How do you find people make contacts so that when you're there, you know, you're productive? And I think this relates to now because now that's virtually impossible. You know, you can try and find people's contacts on LinkedIn or, you know, if they happen to be there or on Facebook, you know, searching names. But I use that to build, you know, names where possible, lists of names. But I rarely kind of sent an email or message someone on social media to make contact initially. In times where I tried that, it was that I almost got no response because they didn't know, you know, who I was presumably. So for me, like, getting into the field and literally just putting myself, I knew that the community that I'm working with lives in a particular sector, quarter within Lahore, the old city. So I just literally turned up there, started hanging around at the entrance to the place and said, look, I'm looking for, I had several people at this community live here. This whole year, you just go inside, speak to another old guy sitting on a, you know, a child for you on the side of the alley. And then he starts, you know, then you slowly kind of find your way in, but just by physically being there. And that was very, like, that was the only way that I was able to get into this community and do, you know, all the interviews that I did and meet so many people. It was literally just by being there. So I think it's very prohibitive now, you know, with that block being there. But yeah, I think, you know, we're fortunate that we've been able to get out and to build that connection to then bring it forward onto the internet and maintain it through technology, you know, through the medium technology, I think a rate of difficult to start field work in this just using technology, but maybe possibly in some scenarios, you know. Yeah, my situation is very similar to yours. I mean, I wouldn't be, especially seven years ago, like the internet and social media were not that widespread in Myanmar. So it wouldn't be possible for me to contact anyone. So I needed to be there first. And now, of course, yeah, as you said, my field work is kind of continuing through social media. I can see people posting their own videos. There are some situations in which the ethnographer just leave the cameras to the locals and say like a film whatever you want. It's a different approach, a different methodology, which possibly can give you a different point of view because, of course, we make choices whenever we frame something with our camera, which goes back to Martin's 360, use of 360 videos and also to this question about creative decisions that just came up. So how do we balance? And then the camera just, and back up, lads, they asked us to, we gave it to them. They made a 15 minute film about the illegal alcohol that was being made and destroying them. Interesting. I took the film and edited it to about three or four minutes. So I made decisions at that point, but it was really, I was, but I could see what they were saying. It's the same with anything else. People won't watch a 15 minute film that goes in different directions. You have to attract people who are outside the field. You need to make it, you need to lead them into it. I think it's a different thing for making a film for people who are studying something because they're going in with the idea, I really want to see what's happening here and they'll sit through 10 minutes of nothing happening to find out what's going to happen. But I do find from this question about the auto edit, as things get smaller, cheaper, the technology to send it, even whether it's the 360 film or not, actually leaving a camera with the people there saying, hey, look, just record something, send it over to us here. To me, it's really interesting because then it is the people themselves. I think it's worth people following up, looking up Insight Share, who are an organization from Oxford. They teach particularly indigenous people how to make their own films and let them make films about whatever they want. And they've come up some fascinating stuff that you would probably find difficult to find an academic finding and putting out. It's coming straight from the heart of these people. All sorts of different stories. And I think that is a very big future, actually, the wonder of the internet and things being small enough so people can do that. You don't have to be a multimillion-pound company with producers to make films these days. Yeah, that's actually a very good point. Like even smaller and smaller devices is making doing films even easier to everyone. And people are self-conscious because they're not so... You haven't got a huge camera in people's faces. Yeah, exactly. But it changed in time for you because you have been filming for... What is it? 27 years? So you have basically... You have seen the whole evolution of the... Well, a lot of the evolution is actually being able to take something which can do something in the beginning. I couldn't afford a camera. Then I got one camera and you've got cassette. So you can only film so many... However many DV tapes you take, that limits how much you can film with SD cards if you've got a hard drive and means to back you up. Yeah, but that's what... I mean, that's not a minor issue. I mean, I remember when I started to approach estrogen musicology and fieldwork methodology, my professors always said, we had to be careful on how much tape we would take with us because... And we had to make sure about what we were filming and that the quality was good because we didn't have much more tape left and that was like maybe three meters or five meters, I don't know. And now we have exactly the opposite problem. I mean, I found myself and kill it. I'm sure you have the same problem. I found myself with a huge amount of data and we have to navigate through them and find something that is significant for to show our point and to come up with a nice product and also something meaningful for our research and our thesis. So, I mean, it's a complicated but on the other side. So, yeah, I don't know, just dropping those right now. I still find things from 10 years ago that I completely forgotten about and think, why didn't I find that before? It's just little gems and they're probably all still hidden there and some of them will never be found again, probably, because something will happen to them. Let's see, do we have any other... Yeah, yeah, exactly, Rachel. Tell me about it. What else we have? I think we'd reply to all these questions. There was one comment I saw about why I prefer 360 when the quality is really bad. Yeah, I wanted to ask you that myself. I think... I mean, it's not so much I prefer it. It's for certain... It's for the traditional dance. I think it gives you a better... When it's set up well, it gives you a better feeling of what actually is going on if you've never been there, because you're part of it. Part of the fish eye thing is it could be that you've got older software or something. You should be able to zoom in. It makes it look pretty flat. I'm very interested in projecting it in a space where you could get 40 or 50 people so they're experiencing it together. I find that far more interesting. But the... You really... You know, it's much better if you get 8K. That's more expensive. Mine's 4K. It's not brilliant. You know, it's not brilliant. I can only imagine that it will get better in the future because everything seems to be... Yeah, I've seen some 4K 360 videos and they work really well. I was actually thinking of using these kind of cameras myself because as you can see in my research, she would be extremely useful to have a view that includes everything. The musicians, the dancers, the audience, there is so much going on all the time. But at that point, you have to decide... Oh, sorry. Sorry, I was just saying, if you've got enough light, it's much better quality. I have a shot from in a village camp where it's clear we pull sunlight and it is not sharper than in the forest where you're in a forest and there's no direct sunlight. And it does make a lot of difference. But rather, as soon as you start putting lights and things in, then you lose all the... Yeah, it's more sensible, more difficult to handle. And there are certain things that you can't video as well. There was one time when we actually were making a film about the tours we were doing. We had a couple of guys with cameras and this young lad had brought his forest spirit out of the forest that was a big leafy monster. But it was a parade of light. And so every time they got their cameras out to film it, it ran off into the forest. And they never did film it. Yeah, I think it's time to wrap up indeed. It's 45 minutes have passed. So just to... I mean, before we conclude this, yeah, I mean, we've been recording this session. So hopefully we will be able to share this video with all of you. Hopefully, I think we can include also the question and answers if you... I mean, there is a consent problem here, I guess. But I mean, as long as it concerns us, the three of us at least, I think it's okay. So yeah, I mean, I will be in touch with all of you in the next days. And we still have to decide exactly how to do that. Maybe we will upload it on Source website if we have the chance, because we would like this to stay as an example of how we did it and what we did. Otherwise, I will just send you a link and you will be able to download it. In a way or another, we will figure it out. So yeah, several people have been asking about this. So yeah, don't worry, you will get your recordings. And if that's all, I think. So I want to thank you again. Well, first of all, Kirit and Martin for taking part on this and all the participants for doing this. And thanks again to Rachel for having us organize this and Source Music Department. Can I give the step in there, Lorenzo? Yeah, sure. Yeah, and a big thank you to you for organizing it. I'm really, I've enjoyed it so much. So thank you. Thank you to all three of you. What amazing videos and that really went very smooth. Great job. Okay, thank you. Okay, so if that's it, I would say yeah. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you guys for coming here. And I don't know, see you soon, sometimes, somewhere. Bye-bye. Yeah, thanks.