Project: City Nights - final blog and links to outcomes

Wonderfully high quality text, images and sound flooded in from Townsville, Tasmania, to Jakarta, Fremantle and Darwin... with tales about driving, walking, sleeping, talking, getting lost and found and just being immersed in the moment by moment of human existence. 

The first radio broadcast, on 360, on September 5, 2009 can be heard here. Several more stories broadcast individually, and you can find them listed here.

From August 29-October 20 there was a presentation of images and texts at Federation Square, in Melbourne from 7.30-8pm, every night. 

We also created just for fun, Journey through the night - your images, with our sound.

Keep checking in as there will be a second collection of texts broadcast on 360 later in the year.

You'll find links to all the finalists, including documentaries, here.  And on the 360 website you'll find the edited texts so you can see how the originals were adapted and edited for radio performance - quite a different beast to the written word!

Although City Nights could have been read as a ‘competition’ to win a national broadcast, there was no sign of competitiveness – only support and engagement between  contributors.  

‘Citynighters’ quickly entered into the community spirit of Pool, commenting thoughtfully and generously on each others work (see Street of the Candlesticks for example).   We suggested edits, or just expressed straight appreciation.  We wrote to each other via forums when they became available too, making suggestions and asking for feedback.

As producer I took great pleasure in opening the City Nights tag page, finding intoxicating new content, and giving feedback. 

For me City Nights became symbolic of the ‘web 2.0’ experience.   Quite different to the traditional role of radio feature maker in which the producer makes all the decisions about a program, instead it became a very personal involvement of give and take.  

I became very fond of the characters who roamed these pages, and found myself wanting to nurture them to their fullest expression.

In that spirit we had writer  Jacqui Dent, Pool intern and writer, Meeli  and documentary maker Patrick Wright into the studio to observe various parts of the production process for the audio program of City Nights – from the recording with actors and musicians, to the weeks in the studio itself, crafting the accompanying sound and music.

When we secured a month long screening at Federation Square, Melbourne, for City Nights images, we asked the various Centres for Photography to let their members know - and the photographs too flooded in.   It was a new experience to do the very disparate styles of photography justice and try to work them into a seamless ‘narrative’ of sorts, with audio (see links above).  On that myself and the City Nights engineer Russell Stapleton are just beginners in a newish form  – so forgive us any glitches...

Pool is a dynamic and unique space for engagement between artists, and City Nighters came from and went out to other spaces on the site as well - you'll see them strutting their stuff all over the joint!

It truly has been a pleasure working with all the contributors, their work, the Pool team, the 360 executive producer Claudia Taranto, and of course the very fine sound engineer Russell Stapleton – thanks all for your efforts.

Gretchen Miller
360 producer
ABC Radio National Features and Documentaries

CREDITS

Text adaptation, composition, broadcast and slideshow conceptual design - Gretchen Miller.

Sound and vision engineering – Russell Stapleton.
Music recording – Phil McKellar.

Musicians – Dave Ellis – double bass, Timothy Constable - percussion, Margery Smith – clarinet and sax, and Nick Meredith - guitar.

Actors - Tony Barry, Deborah Kennedy, Toby Schmitz and Ella Scott Lynch. 

You also heard music from The Saints and from Ghost Solaris.

360 City Nights Website design – Abby Robinson.