Process Piece

"The Dawn of Woman"

The Dawn of Woman from Father Tanner on Vimeo.

The process film “Scriptures” captures the authentic moments of a family scripture study. Depicted with their parents and siblings, the children are captured in a raw and beautiful genesis of learning. Our process piece-- although it certainly includes ideas of “raw” and “Genesis”-- does not follow the simple observational approach of “Scriptures.”

Inspired by the Bible’s recounting of Woman’s creation, we decided to document God’s process of making a human being. Since the event happened long before our births/the creation of iPhone voice recorders, we had to create the situation ourselves. Working closely from the text of the Bible, we wrote out a rough outline of sounds we needed and got to work. We voiced the characters ourselves. The fleshy sounds of God building Eve were two pieces of raw chicken, smooshed together to imply the wet construction of a body. We tapped shoes on a carpet to mimic walking, flapped a jacket around for the sound of God descending from and ascending to the heavens, and snapped small chicken bones to mimic tearing a person’s rib out of their body. Once we successfully foleyed our list of noises, we strung them together in GarageBand to create our high class imitation of creation.

Although our entire project was contrived, it still had its own form of creative realism. We knew the story we wanted to tell-- we clearly saw the beginning, middle, and end-- we just had to come up with sounds that formed that story. Constructing those sounds from a scant three Bible verses, however, proved difficult. We had to think beyond our own interpretation of these events to come up with sounds that would make sense. Ultimately, we decided to use sounds that people were familiar with; generic footsteps and a Batman-esque flapping easily translated into movement in our audio process. We enjoyed telling the story with bits of modernity-- opening Adam’s side with a zipper, for example, and using the 1UP sound from Mario to depict Eve finally coming to life.

Unlike traditional process pieces, “The Dawn of Woman”  documents our process of taking a written biblical story and turning it into a modern audio narrative. As God creates Eve out of man’s rib, we create a story out of raw chicken and GarageBand. Armed with nothing but a few Bible verses, we developed and portrayed a working story. The real process in this piece is not God’s creation of woman, it is our creation of narrative.

This work is a collaboration between:

Madison Ellis

Nathan Tanner

Two Chicken Breasts

A Pair of Shoes

A Coat

Mario

and The Bible