BigBlog

Welcome everyone to the collected histories of yours truly! I have set this page up as mainly photos coz my life tends to come in categories.

Here's a precis of the things I get up to..headings may or may not match the galleries, I'm not 100% organised just yet!

OUTDOOR NUT

FLOWER FAN

DANCE NUT

FRENCH SPEAKER (WANNA BE)

MUSIC BOD

MUM

COLLECTOR OF AMUSING INCIDENTS

This blog is mainly in English but I write in French too, so my penpals from Francophone countries are welcome aboard as well.

Salut tous! Bienvenue! Passe toi un bon temps!

Kat

Bonjour tous! On espere que tu peux comprendre ma vie, et aussi que je n'ai fais pas plusiers d'erreurs..

J'aime faire les randonnes dans les collines, at j'aime aussi la plage, les manifestations, et bcp d'autres choses. Les trombinoscopes bien  montrent ma vie.

SVP faire des comments et je vais te repondre vite.

Merci!

Kat

This continues the teaching in SA series.

The sounds you hear on the movies are almost always added in by the Foley artists..often rather peculiar ladies who go around listening to things. The two who did the sounds for 'Godzilla' searched high and low before finding the ideal sound for a dinosaur tracking through soft mud; they pounded half a watermelon with their fists. Perfect.

I LIKE Foley artists!

So it should came as no surprise that my students get to have the same sort of fun.

It's very simple; the kids write a story, and add sounds. The story tends to be short, sometimes not possessing the deepest plot, but it's always full of noisy stuff. We get the sounds from all over..shakers filled with rice, bottles to blow on, water shakers, tin lids, a Huggy container that still scares me when somebody whacks it with a beater for a gunshot..paper, plastic, voices, sticks, cones..you name it, it makes a racket. And of course the kids love it.

They have to read it out to their peers, and this year they had to do it on the microphone, and what busy little Foley artists we had too!

We put a sound file up. It's not professional quality..but it's ours. We hope you like it.

If you blow a raspberry down a tube it makes a noise. If you go out and find some hollow timber and clean it up you have a didgeridoo. NT aborigines cut down trees; here we have to hunt out hollowed branches. But I did it. And it works and it is fun to make. So go for a walk and try it.

Tandanya Aboriginal center in Adelaide has 'How to make and play a didgeridoo' by Mike Hudson, which is where I got the idea from.

You Californians will know all about autumn fires; your Santa Ana gets going and the brush fires begin. It happens here too; only we get the strong northerlies, and they blow UP the hills, not down them..so you can imagine our fires are pretty big once they get going. A nice strong northerly of say 50 mph and a temperature of 105? Bring it on!

Adelaide is flanked by hills that go to 2000 feet so the people on the plains get a grandstand view. Fires start (often lit by firebugs) and can't be stopped until the fire service meets them at a road, or the backburning traps them, or the southwesterly change comes along and the gusty winds of 50 mph blow the fire backwards on itself. Rain helps.

This fire happened about 2 pm one afternoon and burnt until 5 before the Country Fire Service caught it at a road. As no-one lived in its path it was pretty harmless. The shots are taken about 2 weeks after, with new grass starting to come in. The canopy didn't go up, so in 3 years you won't know a fire had even been there.