The brief, such as it was, was to film a night walk and it's a tricky balance between being dark enough to be visibly night but light enough to see anything at all on film. Also as the opera is set in a time before electric lighting, it was surprisingly hard to film a 5 minute walk without filming distant street lights or security lighting, even in rural Somerset.
I found a back lane behind Whitley farm at the edge of the village and walked quietly and steadily down towards, and then through, the wood and out onto the bottom road as the land levelled out onto the marshland before the flooded peat workings and the bird reserves. It's not often that I walk alone at night and I must do it more often. Aware that I was filming, and with perhaps slightly heightened senses, I could hear birds settling in for the night and as it got too dark to see beyond the trees around me I could hear the repetitive wheezy rhythm of flocks of geese flying overhead into their night-time roosting fields. Treading quietly over the gravely road and trying to keep a steady hold of the camera as I panned around towards the setting sun I could also hear the unmistakable calls of booming bittern dampened by the distance but clearly audible away over the reed beds.
I've found the same when recording sound - although you are often trying to capture something specific, the mediation of the world through the device with which you're capturing it really makes you pay attention and pick out things you wouldn't normally. It's a really neat way of recalibrating your senses and appreciating the mundane in a new way. And the come-down is better acid.
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